


For Your Own Good

by AnneBWalsh



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Different Setting, Dreamworld, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-04-23
Packaged: 2018-03-15 19:47:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 81,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3459665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnneBWalsh/pseuds/AnneBWalsh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry Potter finally has the family of his dreams, as different from the Dursleys as they could possibly be. Problem is, they're only in his dreams, and as his relatives are always telling him (for his own good, you know), dreams don't come true. Harry's wish to find out if the people he loves also exist in his waking life touches off a strange and wonderful chain of events, which will change the destiny of the entire wizarding world, and possibly give its Big Damn Hero the chance to write his very own definition of good. Shiny. (Please note the no-warnings tag is for spoiler avoidance on a possible death. No other warnings would apply.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 2319 Tudor Lane

From a broadcast on the Wizarding Wireless Network, 5 January, 1991:

“Also of interest this evening: everyone’s favorite source for offbeat news, _The Quibbler_ , has released its set of predictions for the upcoming decade. A rise in the popularity of edible earrings is apparently in store, as is a second war with You-Know-Who and the discovery of a foreign-born heir to the House of Black. It seems no one’s told editor Xenophilius Lovegood that You-Know-Who has been dead and the last living member of the House of Black imprisoned for the vast majority of the last decade, but then, what fun would that be. And now, the weather…”

* * *

 

“I’m passing back your three-page story assignments now,” the teacher told her class of ten-year-olds, walking down the front row of desks and handing each child a small pile of papers, from which they took their own marked story and turned around to give the person behind them the rest. “Most of you remembered what we’ve been covering in class, and used things like descriptive details and humor to make your world and your characters vivid and real. But one story in particular was excellent, and I’d like to share a little of it with you now.” Picking up a stapled set of pages from her own desk, she waited for the final few students in the back to receive their assignments, then began.

“Mr. and Mrs. Blake, of 2319 Tudor Lane, Creedsdale, Pennsylvania, were proud to say that they and their son and daughter were perfectly normal, thank you very much. So were Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds, of the same address, and their son and daughter. They had begun sharing a house, and two kittens named River and Firefly, as a way to save money when their children were tiny, but they had discovered as time went by that they liked it, until now they could hardly imagine living life any other way…”

Near the back of the room, one boy propped his head on his hand and let his eyes behind their round-framed glasses drift shut. He had no need to listen to his teacher read this story. It had been his escape from the grinding mundanity of his aunt and uncle’s house for as long as he could remember, a warm and vivid world filled with color and laughter and life, as real to him as the classroom in which he sat.

_Even if it is only a dream._

The heat from the radiator behind him, cranked to its highest setting on account of the late January cold snap, lulled him towards sleep, and his own words spoken aloud in his teacher’s quiet voice set the scene he knew he would see.

_Just an ordinary morning for Henry Blake and his family. Eating breakfast, dressing for the weather, hurrying out the door so we don’t miss the bus…_

* * *

 

“Why,” demanded Jeanie Reynolds, extracting her gloves from under Firefly the grey tabby, “do you always have to wear that ugly hat Mom made you?”

“It’s a statement,” said her brother Mal before Henry could answer for himself, tweaking a bit of the fringe hanging down from the knitted orange earflaps, then batting a finger through the pompom on the top. “If he’s willing to walk around in public wearing it, that means he’s not afraid of anything.”

“Besides.” Henry shooed calico River off Jeanie’s battered satchel, then scooped it up and waggled it at her. “At least I don’t carry my books around in something covered with hearts and flowers and teddy bears.”

“It is not covered with them.” Jeanie snatched the bag from her courtesy cousin and slung it over her shoulder. “It’s only got one of each!”

“And yet, it still looks sillier than Henry’s hat.” Mal pulled on the long brown leather coat for which he’d saved a year and a half’s worth of birthday, Christmas, and extra-chores money. “I think he looks pretty good in orange, myself. Sets off his skin tone. Everybody got everything?”

“I can’t find my parasol!” wailed a voice from the hallway leading back to the bedrooms. “Has anybody seen it?”

Jeanie sighed. “It’s below freezing out, Pearl,” she said in a tone of much-tried patience. “You don’t need a parasol.”

“Do too!” Henry’s little sister, eight years old to his and Mal’s ten and Jeanie’s eleven, erupted into the main room in the flurry of movement he always associated with her. “Sun is even _worse_ when it’s reflecting off snow, Daddy _says_ so—”

“Except that the sun’s barely up yet,” Henry cut her off, gesturing to the side windows of the house, beyond which only the faintest tinge of pink could be seen in the eastern sky. “And we don’t exactly have a long walk to get to the bus stop.” Over her shoulder, he caught sight of the clock hanging on the kitchen wall. “But we do have to leave. Now. Bye Dad, bye Aunt Gigi!”

“Bye Mom!” Mal added his own voice to the chorus, over Jeanie’s “Bye Uncle Ryan!”

Chattering together about the events of the day to come, the two pairs of siblings hurried out the front door. Henry, as the last one through, made sure to twist the tiny metal switch on the inside of the doorknob which would lock it, since both of the adults currently home were down in the basement, then speeded his steps to catch up with the others, tweaking one of his sister’s myriad of tiny braids which had escaped her red jacket’s hood and dodging her snapped teeth with ease.

It was going to be a good day. He could feel it.

* * *

 

“…so as you can see, we get a strong sense of the characters and the world in which they live, even from such a short sketch as this,” the teacher was saying. “I’ll be sending a letter home with the student who wrote this, to recommend some specialized classes or one-on-one tutoring to develop this gift further—”

Her voice was cut off by the bell. “Homework, look over what I’ve marked on your stories!” she called out over the sound of a classroom full of students shoving chairs back, stuffing books into their bags, and hurrying towards the door on their way to lunch. “We’ll be having another assignment like this next week, so think about what you might plan to do differently!”

The boy who’d written the story ignored his cousin’s meaningful grimace as the larger boy clumped out of the room with his usual crowd around him, concentrating instead on gathering up the books which had in some mysterious way become dispersed on the floor around his feet. By the time he got the last of them into his bag, he was alone in the room with his teacher.

“Is something wrong, Harry?” she asked quietly.

“No, Miss.” Harry Potter pushed his glasses up his nose, looking everywhere except at his teacher’s face. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“If I give you that letter, is it going to get lost somewhere between here and your aunt and uncle?” Paper rustled as the teacher picked up another sheet from her desktop. “Or have I already done the damage just by saying I was going to?”

Keeping his eyes averted, Harry nodded once, quickly.

“I’m sorry.” The teacher sighed. “I should have remembered your cousin’s in this class.”

“It’s all right, Miss.” Harry looked up and risked a smile at the moderately disgusted expression on the teacher’s face as she glared towards the door. “I’ll just get sent to my—room for showing Dudley up, and that means I can think about this world some more.”

“A good attitude to have.” The teacher held out her sheet of paper. “And some good information as well, once you’re old enough to take advantage of it. Some of these classes are held at Stonewall High after school, and they’re free for any student who wants to sign up.”

“Thanks.” Harry came to the front of the room and accepted the paper after a brief hesitation, folding it in half and tucking it between two of his books. “Have a good day, Miss.”

“I will, Harry. You do the same—oh, and before I forget.” The teacher opened one of her desk drawers and took out a small paper bag, setting it on the corner of her desk. “It was my turn to clean out the lost and found box the other day, and I came across this. You wouldn’t happen to know who it belongs to?”

Harry opened the bag and looked down at its contents, then glanced back at the corner of the room where his teacher’s handbag was sitting. It wasn’t quite closed at the top, and he could just see a pair of blunted metal points inside it.

“I think it’s mine, Miss,” he said with as close to a straight face as he could maintain, pulling out the gaudy knitted hat, done in wide horizontal blocks of various shades of orange. “Thank you.”

“You’re quite welcome, Harry.” The teacher smiled. “On your way, now.”

* * *

 

Thoughts of his two worlds occupied Harry while he ate his lunch, to the point where he barely noticed when Dudley helped himself to Harry’s chocolate pudding (a common occurrence in any case). His life with the Dursleys could not quite be described as unbearable, but he had no trouble understanding the choices made by his dreaming mind.

His Aunt Petunia, for instance, could become nearly hysterical over a misplaced knickknack or an undusted cabinet at number four, Privet Drive, so the standard of housekeeping at 2319 Tudor Lane placed more emphasis on comfort than appearance. Dudley’s best use for Harry was as a target or a punching bag, whereas Mal’s glib tongue and Jeanie’s wealth of knowledge, not to mention little Pearl’s wickedly fast throwing arm, were pretty much guaranteed to be on Henry’s side in any given argument. And while his Uncle Vernon poured scorn on all foreigners, Harry’s dreaming life took place almost entirely in America.

 _Though I’ve always thought there’s a story behind that._ Harry shrugged. _Given that it’s a dream, it’s likely to be something along the lines of “so the talking snake can’t eat all the magical red rocks”, but still. I’m always meaning to ask why we moved to Creedsdale, how old I was when it happened, all sorts of things, and then I forget about it because we’re doing something different._ He smiled to himself. _We do a lot of different things at Tudor Lane. For that matter,_ I’m _different there, and not just my name, either!_

Harry Potter saw a rather thin face looking back from the mirror every morning, with bright green eyes surrounded by the wire frames of his glasses, a tousled mess of black hair with a fringe half-hiding a scar shaped like a bolt of lightning, and peachy-pale skin, more or less tan depending on the season. Henry Blake saw the first few things as well, but his skin, like his parents’, was a warm brown like oak leaves in autumn, making the lightning-bolt scar harder to spot even when his bangs weren’t hiding it. His cheeks were rounder, likely because he’d never had to sneak food as Harry would tonight, and his chin had a slight divot where his sister, age three, had bounced a toy car off it after he’d kicked over the miniature racecourse she’d built.

_Nobody’d ever think we were the same person. And maybe that’s why America. Maybe we had to get out of the country in a hurry, because we’re in hiding from something, or someone…_

But at this point Harry’s thoughts, as ever, ground to a halt, because it seemed unbelievable that either of his incarnations would need to hide from anything. Harry himself could not possibly have been more ordinary (always discounting the weird things which occasionally happened around him), and the strangest thing in Henry’s life was the fact that his family, as he defined it, included his parents’ best friends and their children. The older two Reynolds had been “Uncle John” and “Aunt Gigi” to him and Pearl since they’d been able to talk, just as his own parents were “Uncle Ryan” and “Aunt Thea” to Jeanie and Mal.

 _Though no, that’s not quite right. There is something a bit odd about us in the dreams._ Harry’s forehead furrowed as he thought about it. _Nothing that would cause trouble, I don’t think. Just something that makes us different. But somehow, when I wake up, I can never remember what that is._

He shrugged again. Anything he couldn’t remember was unlikely to be important, and he didn’t need to waste his time over it.

_Besides, it’s not like stuff that happens in my dreams could change anything about my real life._

Absently, he reached into his bag to twine his fingers into his newly acquired hat.

* * *

 

Henry bolted awake in the corner bedroom he shared with his cousins and sister, his Uncle John standing beside his upper bunk, one hand on his shoulder. “There you are,” the older man said, a smile relaxing a few of the worry lines on his strongly triangular face. “Are you all right?”

“I think so.” Henry concentrated on his surroundings, on the sights and sounds and smells of home all around him, and slowly his heart and his breathing began to calm. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

“Main room?” His uncle nodded towards the lower bunk, curtained off with black fabric as Mal preferred his privacy at nights, then glanced across the room to the full-sized bed in which Jeanie and Pearl slept snuggled together. “Let’s not wake anybody else.”

“’Kay.” After another moment to make sure his arms and legs would take his weight, Henry sat up and swung himself over the end of the bunk beds to climb down the built-in ladder there, scooping up his glasses from the nightstand along the way. Uncle John had already gone ahead to the main room, and Firefly emerged from the bathroom door as Henry passed it to strop her length against his legs, purring. He scooped her up and held her against his shoulder, allowing her to reach up and rub the side of her jaw against the corner of his glasses, then carried her out into the main room, where he set her down on the back of one of the armchairs and curled up in it himself.

“Bad dream, Greeneyes?” Uncle John asked from the general vicinity of the kitchen, where he was doing something Henry couldn’t quite see in the dim light from the moon outside.

“Mm-hmm.” Henry reached over to the couch to get one of the little throws his Aunt Gigi liked to crochet, tucking it around his legs and feet. His blue-striped pajamas were comfortable, but he hadn’t thought to grab his bathrobe, and two o’clock on a January morning tended to be chilly in Creedsdale.

“Same sort of thing as usual?” Returning to the main room, Uncle John set down on the table between the couch and Henry’s armchair a tray with two steaming mugs on it. Henry couldn’t help but smile as the scent of mint and Firefly’s inquisitive trill came to him simultaneously. Nothing cleared away the fog of bad dreams more quickly than having to keep a curious feline out of one’s cup of catnip tea.

“Just about,” he answered belatedly, picking up his favorite mug (“Discover glorious destiny, defeat loathsome villain, marry gorgeous redhead…my work here is done”) and blowing on the contents. “My stupid cousin ratting me out for doing well in school, my crazy uncle shouting at me for doing better in school than my stupid cousin, my crazy aunt picking my story apart almost word by word…” He frowned, shifting his mug to one side as Firefly flowed down from the back of the chair into his lap. “I still don’t understand why she was reading it so carefully, or why she looked relieved when she got to the end. What did she think she was going to see?”

“What did she see?” Uncle John picked up his own mug (“Drinking my tea one hundred degrees hotter than everyone else since 1960”) and took a sip, careful not to spill any on his soft red robe. “Just a story about us, about our lives and how we live them?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” Henry blew on his tea again, then warmed his hands against the mug. Firefly was sniffing hopefully at the rising steam, and River squeezed out from under the couch, her black-tipped nose twitching. “Getting up in the morning, with Aunt Gigi fixing us breakfast before we head to school. Mal and I teasing each other on the bus until Jeanie smacks us both with her math book. You taking an early afternoon from the library and coming to get us at school, or Mom bringing us to one of the lounges at the hospital until she finishes rounds. Pearl’s dance class, Mal’s flute lessons, Jeanie’s science club, my baseball, Dad popping out of the basement to get second opinions on a scene he’s writing…just the usual everyday routine.”

“Not having the privilege of knowing your crazy dream aunt, I can’t say what she was looking for, but I’m glad she didn’t find it.” Uncle John removed the small bag filled with catnip leaves from his tea and emptied it into the slop bowl on the tray, which he set on the floor, getting the instant attention of both cats. “Your dreams sound disagreeable enough without your aunt and uncle— _that_ aunt and uncle, I should say—having any more reasons to give you a hard time.”

Henry risked a sip of tea. It was still sufficiently hot to sting his mouth, but the soft minty taste took him back to the leaves he’d helped to harvest from his mother’s backyard garden on a warm summer evening, and the swallow brought a smile in its wake. “I just wish I knew what they wanted from me,” he said restlessly, watching Firefly’s striped head and River’s patchy one bob up and down as they nibbled at the wet catnip. “They’re always slapping punishments on me, ‘for your own good’, they say, and then they keep on watching me out of the corners of their eyes while I do whatever it is. Like they think I’m going to evolve on them or something.”

“Gotta catch ‘em all,” his uncle quipped, making Henry snicker. “And are they still following what your father calls the Three-Step Plan to a Big Damn Hero?”

“You mean the cupboard under the stairs, the old clothes and broken glasses, making sure I never have any friends or anyone who could help me? All still happening right on schedule, and nobody’s noticed yet.” Henry paused, reflecting. “Except this one teacher at school, the one who liked my story and made me the hat I wrote about. Miss…whatever her name is. I can’t remember.” He sipped at his tea again. “Not that it matters, really. I’m done at that school in June, and I won’t be back.”

“No, you won’t.” Uncle John leaned back against the couch cushions, chuckling. “Either in your dreams, or in reality. But that, as your father would say, is a story for another day.”

“Yeah.” Henry swirled his tea gently in his mug. “You know what I wish?” he said after several long, silent moments. “I wish things worked both ways. Like I know I really do have a cousin named Dudley, and an Uncle Vernon and an Aunt Petunia, even if I’ve never met any of them for real. It’s like Mal’s cousin Dora, where he’s related to her through his birth mom. Except Dora’s pretty awesome, and the Dursleys…” He shrugged. “Not so much. I can handle it, they’re not that bad, but it might be nice if somebody from around here existed on that side of things too. Just saying.”

“Well, they are dreams.” Uncle John tipped his tea back and forth in his mug, studying its surface as though trying to see the future. “I’m reliably informed it’s possible to learn to control what one dreams about.”

“What I’d like best would be if they’d just go away,” Henry muttered, and finished his tea in three long swallows.

“You and me both, Greeneyes.” His uncle accepted the empty mug and set it on the tray beside his own. “Feeling better?”

“Mostly.” Henry turned his attention to the nip-drunk cats. Firefly had fallen over on her side and was paddling her paws weakly in the air, as though trying to catch invisible bugs, while River was pouncing frenetically on a piece of fluff from the carpet. “But one thing does worry me. When I’m awake here, when I’m Henry, that life feels like a dream, a really boring dream that I don’t have to think about too much. But when I’m awake there, when I’m Harry, _this_ life is the dream, the really good dream that can’t ever actually happen.” He looked up at his uncle, meeting eyes of a lighter green than his own. “So which one is true?”

“Which one do you want to be true?” Uncle John countered, standing up and drawing a slender rod of wood from the pocket of his robe. A swish and flick lifted the tea tray from the table, and a long and graceful motion of wrist sent it gliding into the kitchen to land, judging by the quiet clatter, neatly in the sink. “Which one do you believe in more? Magic is rooted in belief, Henry. Want something badly enough with your heart, put your head and your hands to work getting it, and you might be surprised where you’ll end up.”

“Back in the cupboard, is where I’m going to end up tonight.” Henry slung the crocheted throw over the back of the armchair and got to his feet. “Still, there’s worse things. It’s private, at least, and quiet. Pearl whimpers in her sleep, did you know that? And Jeanie sucks her thumb.”

“Still?” Uncle John sighed, returning his wand to his pocket. “I thought we’d weaned her off doing that. We’ll have to take some stronger measures in the next few months, because unless young wizards and witches have changed quite a lot since my days at school, the girls in her dormitory would take especial pleasure in tormenting her within an inch of her life if they found that out.”

Henry laughed a little, and hugged his uncle good night at the door to his bedroom, setting his glasses on the nightstand once more and clambering up the rungs into his bed. Curling up on his side, he closed his eyes and focused his attention inwards, on the two editions of himself and their utterly different realities.

 _I want that life,_ he enunciated clearly in his thoughts, envisioning Harry Potter’s dreary existence in a tiny corner of Surrey with the relations who hated him, _to look more like this one._ Henry Blake’s world spilled out before his mental eyes, in all its cheerfully chaotic glory and complete with honest-to-goodness magic (employed sparingly by the adults of the Tudor Lane household, but never hidden from their children, any more than their origins or former identities had been). _I want a chance to do something_ I _want to do, instead of always being told what to do “for my own good”. To meet people who might actually like me, and want to be my friend…_

The faces of his family hummed through his mind at this, until he set them firmly aside. Some things were too much to hope for, even in dreams.

 _And I want it soon,_ he added as he felt himself drifting back towards sleep. _Because I’m going to need it._

Harry Potter might not know it yet, but Henry Blake had known for years that his family’s jokes about being a Big Damn Hero weren’t really jokes at all.


	2. A Wish Your Heart Makes

Harry sat at the kitchen table, trying to concentrate on his maths homework and get as many answers down as possible before Dudley, climbing ponderously onto a kitchen chair behind him, came to the inevitable ending of his expedition after the chocolate biscuits Aunt Petunia had stashed atop the refrigerator. _Three-quarters divided by five-eighths is three-quarters times eight-fifths, is twenty-four over twenty, is six-fifths, is one and one-fifth…_

His pencil had barely finished tracing the final 5 when Dudley's foot slipped.

The resulting crash shook the entire house.

Swiftly Harry scooped up his books and was inside his cupboard with the door shut before Dudley had enough breath back to start yelling. Switching on the torch he'd liberated from Dudley's second bedroom some years ago, he moved to the next problem on the page. _Three-tenths divided by seven-twelfths is three-tenths times twelve-sevenths…_

Three problems later, he stopped and looked up at the torch where it stood, balanced on its end, on top of the box where he kept his clothes. He'd been about six years old when he'd removed it from the back of one of the overcrowded shelves in the smallest bedroom upstairs, and now he was less than four months from being eleven. Dudley's vast array of beeping, whirring, flashing toys and gadgets seemed to need a change of batteries almost every other day, yet the little torch had never failed to come to life at Harry's hand on the switch.

"You shouldn't still work," he murmured under his breath. "Why do you?"

* * *

"Simple," said Ryan Blake, author of the popular Townhouse series of fantasy-set mystery novels, leaning his chair back on two legs. "Magic."

"Stop that." Dr. Thea Blake slapped her husband on the top of the head as she passed by his place at the kitchen table. "I won't be stitching you up if you fall over."

"She's so strict," Henry's dad complained, rolling his gray eyes, but lowered his chair legs to the polished wood floor nonetheless. "As I was saying, kid, your magic's coming in. You've probably been powering that little flashlight all by yourself for the last couple years."

"Cool." Henry frowned at a funny-looking answer to one of his worksheet problems, then let out a small "ha" of understanding, erased the denominator he'd written down wrong, and blew away the eraser bits before attacking the problem again from that point. "How'm I going to find out magic's real, though?" he asked when he had a more suitable answer. "In the dreams, I mean. The Dursleys aren't exactly going to tell me!"

"You'd think they would have." Henry's mom leaned against one of the kitchen counters, surveying her menfolk with thoughtful deep brown eyes. Her hair, as black as either of theirs, grew in thick twists rather than the messy mops father and son sported, and she wore it clipped close to her head, giving her the look of a warrior helmed for battle (not an inaccurate description, Henry thought, although the enemies against which she most usually fought were diseases Muggle and magical rather than human beings). "You'd think Petunia would have, at any rate. She certainly knows enough about it. But I suppose when she finally accepted she was never going to have magic of her own, she decided it wasn't worth having in the first place."

"Sour grapes." Ryan drew his wand, its polished mahogany only a shade or two darker than his skin, and sketched a trellised grapevine in midair, with a fox underneath it, leaping at the tempting bunches but coming up short every time. "If she can't have it, nobody should. Come to think of it, that's probably why they're so rough on you, kid. They're hoping to stamp the magic out of you."

"But they can't be _too_ terrible, because they've seen what you can do if you feel truly threatened." Thea chuckled. "I remember that story about you suddenly finding yourself on the roof!"

Henry mimed a tremendous leap with one hand, landing it on top of the other, which he'd tented to look like a ridgepole. "I wonder if I could still do that when I get to school?" he said thoughtfully.

" _No_ ," said both parents in chorus, before Ryan gave his short, barking laugh and waved a hand for Thea to proceed.

"No for three reasons." Thea ticked them off on her fingers, a similar shade of brown to her own rosewood wand. "First, we are trying to fly under the radar here, young man, not light it up like the Fourth of July. You and your cousins will get quite enough attention for being raised American. We don't need to give anyone a reason to look harder at us. And second, which applies to both you _and_ your dream-self, so don't start," she cut Henry off before he could get his mouth open. "Once you have your wand, your magic will channel through it, which means you'll be far less able to pull off anything like that. You'll also be more likely to hurt yourself if you try it anyway, and I do not intend to fly several thousand miles to visit you in the infirmary."

"Yes, Mom." Henry stabbed his pencil moodily into his worksheet, then stopped. "Wait. You said three reasons. What's the third one?"

"It's sitting right there." Thea pointed at her husband, who was leaning back in his chair again. "Joint holder with his best friend, who also happens to be your birth father, of the records for most points ever lost by, and most detentions ever given to, any pair of students over the last thousand years. Which is one record no child of mine will be trying to break, thank you."

"Rub it in, why don't you," muttered Ryan with a sidelong glare. "I know what you and this one's mum used to get up to."

"The difference being that we never got caught at it." Thea dusted her hands off smugly. "In any case, Henry love, your dream-self is probably in for a bit of a shock come late July. There's no question you count as magically born, with your birth father a wizard and your birth mum a witch, and while it's true you were raised by Muggles, they were Muggles who're legal to know about magic under the Statute of Secrecy, which means you'll most likely be down in the archives as already knowing the basics yourself. And that would mean you'd get just the standard letter by owl post. No preparatory visit, no extra explanation, nothing."

"Oh, boy." Henry scribbled his name at the top of his worksheet and folded it inside his math book, snapping it shut. "Can't wait to hear what Aunt Petunia will have to say about that."

"Why's she have to know?" Ryan caught himself on the corner of a shelf filled with cookbooks as he started to overbalance. "Why should any of them? Given their past record with letting you keep hold of nice things, I'd hope you're smart enough not to flaunt your letter in front of them!"

"Well, they're going to have to be involved somewhere along the way." Thea bent down to stroke River, who was nudging at her knee for attention. "You can't exactly go out one day and buy a train ticket to London, and come back with a trunk full of spellbooks and robes and a cauldron, without them realizing something's up. Come to think of it, you could hardly do that in any case, could you? I doubt they've ever considered giving you pocket money."

"There's ways around that." Henry waggled his fingers. "Dudley gets pocket money, and he doesn't always count it as carefully as he should. But I don't much want to go to London all on my own, even if it is just in my dreams. Bad things happen in dreams too. And besides." He grimaced. "I'll have to deal with being a celebrity when I walk into the Leaky Cauldron for the first time, won't I? Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived, and all of that garbage." He angled until he could see his reflection in the mirror hanging on the side wall. "I wish there were some way I could go looking like this. Nobody knows anything about Henry Blake. He's just another kid getting ready for Hogwarts…"

* * *

He roused, momentarily confused as to where and who he was, until his hand knocked against a box and he recognized the cupboard under the stairs at number four, Privet Drive. His head was swimming with words that made no sense, words like "Hogwarts", "Leaky Cauldron", "spellbooks", "Muggles"…

 _Magic._ Harry laughed under his breath, sitting up carefully and switching on his torch. _My dream family has magic. Just in case I had any doubts that it really is a dream!_

Then he looked again at the torch, dutifully shedding its improbable light.

 _Don't get too excited,_ warned his practical side (which sounded, to his amusement, rather like Henry's cousin Jeanie). _You only use the torch when you know you won't get caught with it, and that isn't so very often, so it's possible one set of batteries could have lasted all this time. And besides, even if magic were real, how would you know so much about it in a dream when you don't know anything while you're awake?_

"It's a good question," Harry murmured aloud, clicking the torch off and lying down again. "I don't know, but I know who I could ask…"

* * *

"Dreams, you say?" Henry's Aunt Gigi scrubbed at another bowl with the yellow soap-filled pad in her hand. "I have done a bit of research on dreams in my time." She tapped a finger against the dish drainer, which was half-full of clean, dripping items. "Those who work may also ask questions."

Henry plucked the dishtowel from its place on the handle of the cabinet set into the wall behind the sink and helped himself to a handful of forks. "Could I know something in a dream that I don't know when I'm awake?" he asked, wiping the forks dry and depositing them in the silverware drawer in front of him before going back for more. "Like if I learned a secret while I was asleep and being Harry, is it possible that secret would be true when I woke up back here?"

"Well, yes and no." Aunt Gigi blew a strand of her mid-brown hair off her slightly crooked nose (legacy of a roller-skating accident at age eight) and pursed her lips as she considered the question. "I doubt you could truly learn anything in a dream that you had absolutely no way of finding out in your real life. If you told me, let's say, that you'd dreamed the secret of an ancient Egyptian puzzle hidden away somewhere in Japan, I'd tend to think that's just your mind amusing itself. But if it's something that you might conceivably have come into contact with, then there's a chance the answer's yes."

"Why?" Henry sorted the last handful of towel-dried silverware into its proper slots in the drawer, then went to work on glasses and mugs. "And how would that work, anyway?"

"It's all to do with what dreams are, and how they're related to reality." His aunt paused, a faint blush suffusing her pale cheeks. "Not that I have any right to talk about that," she muttered, then shook her head, dismissing her momentary mood. "Pardon me. Dreams, as I understand them, fall into one of two categories. Some of them, as I mentioned before, are nothing more than your mind amusing itself. But others are one part of your mind trying to talk to another part. And those are the ones where it's possible you could find something out that you didn't know you knew."

"How can one part of me know something when another part doesn't?" Henry slid glasses into their place on the shelf in an upper cabinet. "That doesn't make any sense."

"Bear with me here, Henry." Aunt Gigi narrowed her brown eyes in thought for a moment, then nodded. "All right, imagine that everything you see and hear during the day is like a box full of pieces for a jigsaw puzzle." She angled her head towards the main room, where one of these items was currently set out in a partial state of completion. "Only the pieces aren't from only one puzzle, but a dozen of them, all different, and maybe a handful of random ones that don't belong anywhere, just to make it harder. And while you're awake and living your life, while you're thinking about the thousand things you have to do just to get through an ordinary day, you don't have time to do anything with those puzzle pieces. But when you're asleep…"

"When I'm asleep, my mind might have time to sort through some of them, and maybe start putting them together." Henry nodded, picking up a blue plastic mixing bowl and starting to dry it. "So if my aunt and uncle, my dream aunt and uncle, the Dursleys, if they were keeping a secret from me, from Harry. A secret like my being a wizard. If I'd heard them talking about bits and pieces of that secret without realizing it, or seen or done things that might be part of it, then it might all come together in my dreams?"

"It might." His aunt chuckled. "But then, to Harry, this life is the dream, isn't it?"

"In more ways than one." Henry gazed out the window at the backyard of 2319 Tudor Lane, green with the advancing springtime, his little sister busily weeding her way around the edge of their mother's newly planted vegetable garden. "He wants what I have, so much, and there isn't any way for him to get it. He'll be lucky if he even makes any real friends at Hogwarts, instead of people who're just interested in being able to say they know The Boy Who Lived."

"Oh, I don't think it'll be that bad." Aunt Gigi shook her head. "All Harry will have to do is be himself, and people will soon realize he's not interested in inflating his ego or bragging about his magical prowess or trying to be the center of attention all the time. Because he's you, dear heart, and you don't do that." She leaned over to kiss the top of his head. "We wouldn't let you. Besides, think of the friends you've already made, when we've taken our trips over there every so often. I'm sure Harry will have just as easy a time making friends when he goes away to Hogwarts."

"I hope so." Henry finished drying his mixing bowl and set it down on the counter. "But he has to get there first. And figuring out some way to do that without getting the Dursleys involved, when he doesn't have an owl of his own to reply to the letter…" He snorted. "An owl of his own, what am I talking about? He doesn't even know owl post is for real! And I don't think he'll be too convinced by remembering he dreamed about it," he added at his aunt's raised eyebrow. "Like you said yourself, you can dream up all sorts of weird things, but that doesn't make them true. It could just be his mind keeping itself busy through the night."

"No, but if he remembers dreaming about a letter written in emerald green on parchment, a letter that doesn't have a stamp and is addressed very particularly to him, and then that exact same letter arrives at number four, Privet Drive, one morning, that might just get his attention, don't you think?" Aunt Gigi held Henry's gaze, and waited until he nodded. "And it might just get him to remember what to do with that letter. Which is very simple. Hide it, keep it safe, and don't open it."

"What?" Henry blurted. "But if he doesn't open it—"

"If he doesn't open it, the enchantment back in a certain office at Hogwarts will report that his letter hasn't been read by the person it's addressed to," his aunt cut him off smoothly. "Accurately so, of course, since it's difficult to read a letter you haven't opened. Another letter will therefore be sent to him immediately, to arrive around the same time as the Muggle post the next day. Which means that early the next morning, there will undoubtedly be a post owl flying down Privet Drive. And when was the last time you met a post owl that wouldn't wait a moment to take another letter if you asked it politely?"

Henry shrugged, trying to hide his rising excitement. "I haven't met very many post _owls_ at all. Mostly we use crows or pigeons around here. Blends in better."

"Literalist." Aunt Gigi pinched the top of his ear with two soapy fingers. "But you see where I'm going with this, don't you?"

"I see it." Henry stopped bothering to restrain his grin. "And as Pearl would say, it's _shiny_. Which means, if it were a thing instead of an idea, we'd have to hide it when it gets to be mail time around here," he added. "Crows think every shiny thing in the world should belong to them."

"Crows think everything in the world in general should belong to them," his aunt corrected. "Which is why so many people prefer pigeons. They take longer and they can't carry much, but they're reliable. Crows are always looking out for number one first and foremost, and unless you understand that about them, you'll get nowhere fast." She winked at Henry. "Why do you think we've been letting Mal handle all the outgoing mail around here for years?"

Henry laughed aloud, scooping up a smaller green mixing bowl from the dish drainer to dry it, then stacking it inside the blue one on the countertop. For this moment, his two worlds were in harmony, and life was very good.

* * *

… _and life was very good,_ Harry finished in his best handwriting, ignoring the yells from Dudley's gang in the living room as they battled to their video game characters' deaths in multiplayer Mega-Mutilation Part 2. Stacking together the sheets of paper on which he'd written his final story assignment for the year, he started reading it over from the beginning, swallowing against the feeling of a small nest of snakes squirming around in his stomach. He'd never told anyone about his dreams in his life, and now he was giving his teacher information he'd barely known himself until a month or two before.

 _But she liked my first story about them, and my second one. Even my third one, where I hinted a little bit about the magic. And she made me the hat I wrote about Aunt Gigi making for Henry in the story._ Harry glanced towards the living room and allowed himself a small, smug smile. _The one new thing anyone's ever given me that Dudley hasn't bothered to steal or ruin, because it really does look like I got it out of the lost-and-found box at school!_

Still, winning his teacher's sympathies were one thing. Asking her advice, especially about something he'd heard in a dream, was entirely different. Harry had been debating the subject back and forth with himself for two months, and the answer on which he'd finally settled was the reason for the serpentine love-fest behind his ribs.

Swallowing again, he picked up his pen and moved several lines down on the paper from where the story had ended, taking a deep breath to calm himself before he began.

 _I'm not sure what to think about this,_ he wrote. _I know magic isn't real, but the bit about dreams sounds like it could be true. Maybe there really is a secret one part of my mind knows and another part doesn't. Do you think there could be anything in what Henry's aunt said to him, about puzzle pieces getting put together? Or is it all just the other thing she said, my mind keeping itself amused while I'm asleep?_

Quickly, before he could change his mind, Harry stacked the papers together once more, signed his name at the top of the first one, and slid them into his schoolbag. He'd hand the story in tomorrow during class, and the teacher had said to expect the marked copies back on Friday. That also happened to be the day before Dudley's birthday, meaning his cousin was likely to be distracted enough by the thoughts of upcoming presents that he probably wouldn't bother with snatching the papers out of Harry's hands and flinging them to the four winds or flushing them down the toilet.

 _And I'll have all day at Mrs. Figg's to look over everything I wrote and see if I could make it better._ Harry grinned to himself. _Who'd have ever thought I'd be happy to go to her house? But she won't make me look at her albums full of cats if she thinks I'm doing schoolwork, and I could probably spend a few decent hours doing things like drawing maps of the house on Tudor Lane and showing where all the furniture sits, or writing down the exact rules for crosseball, or describing every step of helping Aunt Gigi cook dinner…_

* * *

Dudley went thundering upstairs as soon as he and Harry arrived home from school on Friday. The crashing noises from overhead suggested wholesale demolition being done, but Harry had heard Dudley in the throes of what passed for a cleaning binge before. His cousin was hauling all of what he considered "this old rubbish" into his second bedroom to make way for the shiny new presents which would surely be thronging the kitchen table in the morning. That suited Harry perfectly, as it meant he would have the living room to himself long enough to pull out the marked copy of his story and look it over.

The red ink dotted in among the lines was sparing, a minor spelling error marked here, a query on the proper use of a word there. Finally Harry turned over the second-to-last sheet, and his breath caught in his throat as he saw the half-tidy paragraphs written in red beneath his own carefully scripted note.

He pressed his palms against his legs once to slow his racing heart, then began to read.

_I'm sure your aunt and uncle would want me to throw cold water on you, Harry. Only for your own good, of course. They'd want me to tell you that believing in such silly things as dreams is just as foolish as thinking magic could be real. But I'm not going to tell you that, because I don't happen to think it's true._

_The dreams you have while you sleep are an expression of the dream you hold in your heart, to find the place and the people who make you happy, who make you feel like you belong. That powerful of a dream is the truest magic in the world, and the only thing really worth living for. Never give it up, no matter what._

_As for the rest of your question, Henry's aunt said that if a letter should come for you that looked a certain way, that you should hide it from your relatives, keep it unopened for the length of that day, and then go outside early the next morning to have a look around. I don't see how that could cause you any harm, so why not give it a try?_

_After all, maybe that post owl really will come flying down Privet Drive._

_Wishing you all the best,_

The teacher's signature was smeared to the point of unreadability, but Harry didn't care. He had his answer.

 _I can't control whether or not I really am a wizard._ Carefully, he set his story aside on the table, so as not to crush it in his hands. _While I'm still a kid, I can't even control where I live or who I see. But I can control what I dream about, and what I want to do about those dreams. And what I want to do is write them down so I don't forget them, and make as many parts of them as possible come true as soon as ever I can. And then—_

Harry caught his breath, thinking of a chair neatly balanced on two legs, a mischievous pair of gray eyes, a careless bark of a laugh.

_My dad, in the dreams, he's an author._

_Maybe I could be one too._

Magic might or might not be real, but Harry didn't think he'd have much trouble writing about it either way.

 _But right now, what I have to do is wait._ Recovering his story hastily as Dudley's voice sounded from overhead, Harry hurried to his cupboard to put his schoolbag safely away before heading into the kitchen to see what Aunt Petunia wanted him to do in the way of chores this afternoon. _If my parents in my dreams are right, if there is such a place as Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and if my name has been down for it since I was born, then about a month from now, early in the morning, something ought to happen that's never happened before here at number four, Privet Drive…_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so, it begins. I'd feel sorry for the Dursleys, but they really don't deserve it.
> 
> Happy Read an Ebook week, O readers! All Anne B. Walsh original ebooks at Smashwords were FREE until March 7, 2015! Visit [my Smashwords profile](https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/AnneBWalsh) to find links to all my published originals. A reminder that Smashwords carries all of the most popular ebook file types, such as Kindle files, epub for Nook or iPad, and PDF, and accepts both credit/debit cards and PayPal. But that won't matter, not for the rest of this week. Happy reading!
> 
> Next time: what will Harry write in his letter back to Hogwarts, and what kind of response will he get? Like [the Facebook page](https://www.facebook.com/annebwalsh.page), read the blog [Anne's Randomness](http://www.annebwalsh.com/blog.html), leave reviews/comments (right here), and more will be forthcoming as soon as possible!


	3. To Know Your Place

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did not write either "The Song That Gets On Everybody's Nerves" or _Five Children and It_. I am happier about one of these facts than the other. I also did not write certain bits of this chapter, which are quotations or paraphrases from the first HP book. You'll find them if you look. I did, however, write the vast majority of this chapter, and I hope that you enjoy it.

Summer Saturday mornings, as far as Henry, Jeanie, and Mal were concerned, were for luxurious lying around in bed, for enjoying the softness of the sheets, the scent of fresh-cut grass blowing in through the window screens, the singing of the birds perched on the electrical wires.

Pearl had other ideas.

"Oh, I know a song that gets on everybody's nerves,  
"Everybody's nerves, everybody's nerves,  
"Oh, I know a song that gets on everybody's nerves  
"And this is how it goes!"

 _Clash, clash, clash_ went two pot lids in time.

Jeanie pulled her pillow over her head, emitting a noise which seemed to be a combination of snarl and groan. _What would you call that?_ Henry wondered idly, wiggling his toes. _A snoan, or a grarl? Maybe just a Jeanie noise._

From beneath him, a small _shush_ of fabric announced the opening of Mal's improvised bedcurtains (gauzy white for summer, rather than the thick black he used in the wintertime). "I think that new Conditional Imperturbable Charm on the grownups' bedrooms is working a little bit too well," Henry's cousin commented as Pearl continued her noisy serenade. "What were the terms they set on it again?"

"Mmm." Henry cast his mind back. "They'll only hear noises from the rest of the house if somebody's bleeding or unconscious, doing accidental magic, or lit something on fire that isn't in the fireplace."

"Is that so." Mal's tanned fingers wrapped around the side of Henry's bunk, followed a moment later by a sleep-rumpled shock of middling-brown hair and a pair of gray eyes alight with the spark of mischief. "That leaves us an awful lot of room to maneuver, if you know what I mean…"

Across the room, a pillow went flying as Jeanie sat up in a rush, her own brown curls standing out around her head like a gorgon's snakes with the accumulated static of the night. "Revenge," she breathed, crooking her own fingers into claws, her skin less tan than Mal's but still a shade or two darker than it had been two weeks ago on the last day of school. "It will be _mine_."

"It will be _ours_ ," Henry corrected, sliding to the bottom of his bed and clambering down in the few brief movements nearly six years of practice had instilled in him, the bunks having been installed over the Fourth of July weekend the year he and Mal were five as their joint birthday present. "We'll hold, you squirt…"

* * *

The shrieking brought Ryan Blake awake with a gasp, his mind full of another place, another name, another life. Darkness and cold, stone walls and solitude, screams and wild laughter all around him, with the worst moments of his life driving icy spears into his heart in an endless loop of 'if only I had' and 'if only I hadn't', and the knowledge that the sole escape available to him was the very thing most to be feared—

 _Easy, boy._ The sunlight outside his white-curtained bedroom windows, the warmth of his still-sleeping wife beside him, slowed his racing heart and loosened the muscles which had tensed to the point of pain. _You made your decision a long time ago, remember? Delusion, dream, or whatever this is, it's the closest thing to good you're likely to see in your lifetime. Enjoy it while it lasts and never take it for granted, because the second you do, bang goes the balloon and we're right back where we started…_

The invoking of this familiar piece of logic enabled Ryan to get a full breath into his lungs and recognize the spluttering screams from the backyard for what they were. His little girl had apparently pestered her older brother and her cousins beyond what they could stand, and they were administering their own brand of summary (and summery) justice via garden hose.

"Go deal with that?" Thea murmured, waving a hand in the general direction of the noise. "'S too early, neighbors'll complain."

"Why do I have to go deal with it?" Ryan complained, but swung his legs out of bed nevertheless. "Why don't you go deal with it? Give me one good reason."

"Because you're already up. Because they're your children too. And most important of all." Thea rolled onto her side to smile up at him lazily. "Because I said so."

"Well, they're not good, but they're reasons." Ryan leaned back to kiss his wife briefly before getting to his feet. "Can there be tea?"

"There can be, if you ask for it properly."

Ryan resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "Please, O gracious goddess of my home and heart, would you be so kind as to make me a pot of tea, as a reward for dealing with—" An extra-loud shriek made him wince. "That," he finished, jerking his thumb towards the backyard. "Little demons that they are."

"Yes, I think I will." Thea arched her back, stretching, then slid out of bed on her own side. "But only because you said please. And only if you keep your side of the bargain."

"On my way." Ryan padded down the wood-floored hallway and into the kitchen, sliding open the glass door which led out onto the small deck built onto the back of the house. "I'm pregnant, she said," he muttered, descending the stairs towards the grass, where Henry and Mal held a dripping and furious Pearl pinioned between them as Jeanie coiled up the hose. "Come to America, she said. Bring the kid, it'll be fun, she said. And just what are you lot up to this morning?" he demanded in a louder tone, causing the three older children to jerk guiltily. "Other than making loud noises and waking up hard-working people who're trying to sleep in?"

"Daddy!" Pearl broke free and ran to him, stopping just short of flinging herself on him with a disgusted look down at her soaked self. "You saw, I didn't do anything—"

"Didn't do anything except wake us up with your stupid song, you mean," Henry interrupted his little sister. "You think you can get away with these things just because Mom and Dad can't hear you anymore—"

"You're the one who insisted on taking it out into the yard," Mal broke in. "I would've been perfectly satisfied with the bathtub."

"Too close of quarters in there." Jeanie shaped a small rectangular box with her hands. "Whoever was holding her down would have gotten wet too. Out here, I could direct the spray, so only the person we wanted to get wet got wet. And isn't that one of the cardinal rules of pranking?" She turned the innocent gaze of the knowledge-seeker onto her uncle. "Limit collateral damage wherever possible?"

Ryan began to chuckle, and then to laugh, his son and nephew and niece joining in as they realized they had successfully dodged parental wrath. Even Pearl started to giggle after a few moments, accepting the towel her father conjured her and beginning to dry herself off.

"I don't suppose it would have been possible to raise you any other way," said the man who had once been one-fourth of a truly notorious group of pranksters, herding his children towards the stairs up to the deck. "But I do feel sorry for Dumbledore and company this fall. Hogwarts isn't going to know what hit it…"

* * *

The dark ones gathered at the doorway of one particular enclosure, frustrated by what they could feel within. The creature lay in a state called 'sleep', which ought to have made him easier prey for their power, but somehow this one contravened all the ordinary rules. The defenses he had long since lost in waking returned to him each night while he slept, and the rich taste of his exhausted despair slipped away, replaced by an emptiness so profound that he might as well have been in a different world.

But the dark ones were nothing if not patient. They could hear the creature breathe, and his heart still beat, therefore he lived. He would awaken, and fall once more under their encompassing spell, and the fire of his fury at finding himself trapped would give a new spice to the feast to be had from him.

It had happened thus many times before, and would, the dark ones were sure, many times again.

* * *

Harry woke slowly, lying very still to hold on to as many of the precious details of the dream as possible. The vivid green of the soft grass under his bare feet, the glint of the morning sunlight in his eyes, the rich sound of his father's amusement as he threw back his head and laughed, all went into his vault of good memories, to be brought out and examined during boring school lessons, tedious sessions of chores with Aunt Petunia, or long and lonely hours in his cupboard.

 _Or at Mrs. Figg's._ Rolling over, Harry reached for his glasses. _Since Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia have had it set up for weeks with Mr. and Mrs. Polkiss that they're going to take Dudley and Piers to the zoo today. Which, I might like to go, but not with them. They'd think it was funny to push me into the wolf exhibit or something, and I'm not so keen to find out if magic's real that I want to try and use it to save my life!_

A rap on the door startled him out of his musings. "Up!" Aunt Petunia snapped shrilly. "Now! You're to look after the bacon, and don't you dare let it burn! I want everything perfect for my Duddy's eleventh birthday!"

Harry stifled a groan and dug out a pair of socks, removing a spider from one of them before he pulled them on. Keeping Henry Blake's answers from coming out of Harry Potter's mouth got harder and harder the older he got. Much of what Henry had to say on the subject of Dudley, or the Dursleys' quirks and foibles, would have been (and often was) met with roars of laughter or applause at 2319 Tudor Lane. At number four, Privet Drive, it was more likely to get him a few days in his cupboard or one of Uncle Vernon's tirades on Ungrateful Boys Who Didn't Know Their Place.

 _Only I do know my place._ Harry ran his fingers through his hair half-heartedly, then shook his head, abandoning the attempt. _How does "anywhere but here" sound?_

With a sigh, he finished dressing and climbed out of his cupboard, heading for the kitchen.

Everything went just as Harry would have expected—the heaps of presents on the table, Dudley's incipient tantrum on discovering that he had fewer of them than last year, Aunt Petunia's hasty promise to buy him some more while they were out and Uncle Vernon's amused satisfaction with Dudley's greed—until the telephone rang and Aunt Petunia went to answer it. Harry took advantage of her absence, and of Uncle Vernon's watching Dudley tear through his presents, to help himself to the last of the bacon.

"Bad news, Vernon," said Aunt Petunia as she came back looking both worried and angry. "Mrs. Figg's broken her leg. She can't take him."

Harry swallowed hastily at this unexpected news and tried to look as small and unassuming as possible.

"I suppose we could telephone your sister…" Aunt Petunia went on.

"Marge?" Uncle Vernon snorted. "Don't be ridiculous, Petunia, she hates the boy. What about your friend, what's her name, Yvonne?"

"On vacation in Majorca." Aunt Petunia looked furiously at Harry as though he'd had some part in Mrs. Figg breaking her leg. Harry repressed the urge to smile (it wouldn't be taken well) and instead let his eyes dart down the hallway towards his cupboard before returning to his aunt's face.

"You could just leave me here," he suggested. "I'll wash up from breakfast and everything."

"And come back to find the house in ruins?" snapped Aunt Petunia, her mouth puckering as though she'd bitten into a lemon.

Harry shook his head hard. "I've got a book," he said earnestly. "That's all I'll do, is wash the dishes and then read until you get back. I promise."

Aunt Petunia visibly wavered. "I suppose we could take him along," she said uncertainly, "and leave him in the car…"

"That car's brand-new!" Uncle Vernon exploded, pounding his fist on the table. "He's not sitting in it alone all day!"

Dudley burst into noisy wails, his best means of extracting anything from his parents which they were not instantly willing to give him. "I don't want him to come!" he bawled as Aunt Petunia flung her arms around him, cooing comfort. "He always spoils everything!" Through the gap in his mother's embrace, he shot Harry a nasty grin.

Harry returned a bland, noncommittal look in Dudley's general direction. He'd perfected the expression as Henry under the searching gaze of father, mother, uncle, or aunt, seeking out the culprit in the latest prank to hit 2319 Tudor Lane.

"Where did you get a book?" Uncle Vernon demanded, peering at him suspiciously. "What's it about?"

"I'll get it." Harry darted down the hall to his cupboard and returned with the battered blue volume he'd taken from the pile by the door of the school library the day before, under the sign stating "FREE BOOKS". "The librarian said they were giving them away because they were too old to stay on the shelves any longer. You can see, it's almost falling apart."

"Hmph." Uncle Vernon turned the book over in his hands once or twice. " _Five Children and It_ ," he read the title aloud. "What's It?"

"I haven't got that far yet," said Harry with perfect truth, although he knew quite well that It was a wish-granting creature known as a Psammead, and the Children of the title were going to get a thorough, but funny and un-preachy, lesson in being careful what they wished for. Reading-aloud time had long been a tradition at Tudor Lane between baths and bed.

"Hmph," said Uncle Vernon again, and handed the book back over to Harry. The doorbell rang, and Dudley stopped crying at once, while Aunt Petunia hurried off to answer it, since it was hardly likely to be anyone but Piers Polkiss and one or both of his parents. Harry waited, his book held between his hands, trying very hard to look as though this answer meant nothing to him.

Finally Uncle Vernon let out a great, grumbling sigh. "No point in spoiling Dudley's special day," he said grudgingly, then turned his beady gaze on Harry. "But I'm warning you, boy. Any funny business, anything at all out of place when we get back, and you'll be in that cupboard from now until Christmas."

"I'm not going to do anything," said Harry quickly. "Except the dishes, I mean."

"Are you trying to be smart with me, boy?" Uncle Vernon barked. "Answer me!"

"No." Harry bit down hard on several follow-on remarks he could have made and instead concentrated on looking meek and helpful, a boy who knew his place. Uncle Vernon snorted but said nothing else, getting to his feet instead to greet Mrs. Polkiss as Aunt Petunia led her and Piers into the kitchen.

Half an hour later, Harry, who couldn't believe his luck, watched the Dursleys' car out of sight down Privet Drive. He'd been left alone in the house for the first time in his life.

"The first time in this life, anyway," he said aloud, just because he could, and laughed at how mad the words sounded. Trotting back into the kitchen, he started running hot water into the sink. The faster he got the dishes done, the faster he could go exploring, and satisfy all the curiosity he'd always had about the corners of the house from which he was normally debarred.

Once the kitchen was spotless, Harry tiptoed upstairs, peering into his aunt and uncle's bedroom and the guest room merely as a matter of form. Dudley's two bedrooms, the one where he slept and the one where he kept everything that wouldn't fit in his first bedroom, were far more interesting objectives. Recalling the lessons Henry had received in the fine art of sneaking around, Harry touched nothing unless he was certain he could replace it in exactly the same way again, and used a cloth to shield his hand from touching anything directly, although he doubted any of the Dursleys would have the same advantages his father and his uncle did in (he smirked to himself) sniffing out miscreants.

Exploring in forbidden territory, however exciting it had started out being, palled quickly when there was no one to share it with, and sooner rather than later Harry was curling up in one of the armchairs in the living room with his book. He flipped it open to page fourteen, where he had left off the night before, and began to read.

 _Then Anthea cried out, "_ I'm _not afraid. Let me dig," and fell on her knees and began to scratch like a dog does when he has suddenly remembered where it was that he buried his bone._

" _Oh, I felt fur," she cried, half laughing and half crying. "I did indeed! I did!" when suddenly a dry husky voice in the sand made them all jump back, and their hearts jumped nearly as fast as they did._

" _Let me alone," it said…_

* * *

"And now everyone heard the voice and looked at the others to see if they had heard it too," Jeanie read aloud from an overhanging limb of one of the trees which shaded the backyard of the brick house on Tudor Lane. Mal was lying sprawled in a patch of shade with his eyes half-shut, his fingers moving lazily in a pattern Henry thought probably indicated him working out a tricky passage in a new song he was learning. In the garden, Pearl was picking beans from one of the tripods on which they grew, with Firefly ribboning through her legs, purring loudly enough that Henry could hear it as a low undertone to Jeanie's voice.

"'But we want to see you,' said Robert bravely," Jeanie went on. "'I wish you'd come out,' said Anthea, also taking courage."

"And that's what does it," said Mal without moving. "She had to out-and-out wish for it. It's always about the wording."

"Just like spells." Henry pretended to wrap his hand around the grip of a wand, and swirled it through a complicated and entirely imaginary spellcasting motion. "You get what you ask for, no more, no less…"

"Do you _mind_?" Jeanie asked pointedly from above. "Or should I just read it to myself?"

"So sorry." Mal opened his eyes to smile up at his sister. "Carry on, we're listening."

"Thank you." Jeanie found her place and continued. "'Oh, well—if that's your wish,' the voice said, and the sand stirred and spun and scattered, and something brown and furry and fat came rolling out into the hole, and the sand fell off it, and it sat there yawning and rubbing the ends of its eyes with its hands. 'I believe I must have dropped asleep,' it said, stretching itself…"

* * *

Petunia walked into the house and cast a quick, fearful glance around. Nothing appeared to be out of place, and Dudley had certainly had a far more enjoyable day at the zoo with only his friend along, not his cousin, but she couldn't help but worry…

She moved into the living room and breathed a sigh of relief. Harry was curled up in an armchair, sound asleep, the blue book he'd had at breakfast tucked under one of his arms. For one instant, she thought of her sister, who had seldom gone anywhere without a book, though in later years the books had been likely to come to life in more than a metaphorical sense.

 _But that won't happen now._ With a little sniff, she pushed that fear away. _After all the pains we've taken, after everything we've done, it just won't happen…_

Harry's eyes shot open, and for one solitary instant Petunia had the wild notion that he did not recognize her. Then he blinked once or twice, sat up, and smiled. "I hope Dudley had a good time," he said. "It was quiet here. Does anything need to come inside from the car?"

"Yes, Dudley's extra presents." Petunia motioned Harry to his feet. "You can take them up to his bedroom, and be careful not to drop them, either."

"I won't." Harry paused in the hall to open his cupboard door and set his book inside, then hurried out to the car, dodging Dudley's punch along the way.

 _Not much like his father._ Petunia pressed her lips together in satisfaction, remembering the arrogant boy her sister had imperfectly tamed. _He would have been hitting back a long time ago. Although…_

A new and disquieting thought had just occurred to her. There had been a report on a morning show a few weeks ago about repressions, how certain people could appear entirely normal for long periods of time and then suddenly snap and become incurably violent.

 _There have been those little…eruptions along the way._ Petunia swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. _What if he's only_ repressed _his magic, and it comes bursting out of him one of these days? Eleven years old, he's about to turn eleven, and that's when it always seems to happen…_

"I wish we had never taken the wretched boy in the first place." The words slipped out of her in a virulent hiss, startling but impossible to take back. "His father had friends, didn't he? _Lily_ had friends, I know she was always bragging about them, how clever they were—why couldn't one of _them_ have taken the child? Taken him before he ever got to us, before we ever even had to know that he existed? I wish they had!" Fisting her hands, she stared at the uncaring sky. " _I wish they had!_ "

* * *

Harry, straightening with his arms full of presents, jerked once. Something had run through him rather like receiving an electrical shock.

 _Strange._ He glanced all around. Dudley was halfway up the path already, Uncle Vernon was still closing the driver's door, and he could see Aunt Petunia just inside the front door, staring upwards as if she thought it was going to rain. _Maybe something magical. Or maybe I just imagined it._

Nudging the door shut with his hip, he started for the house. He'd be wanted to help get dinner ready.

* * *

The ending of school came and went without incident, and the summer holidays started, freeing Harry to spend as much time as possible out of the house, away from Dudley and his gang, who were only too happy to help Dudley out with his favorite game of Harry Hunting. While Harry knew some lovely tricks from his other life which could conceivably have helped him win this game more often, his certainty that anything which happened to Dudley or the other boys would surely be blamed on him left him unable to use most of them, though the evasion techniques had come in handy a time or two.

Mostly, Harry wandered the neighborhood, musing about the unheard-of luxury of life without Dudley. Whether or not his dreams had any connection to reality, he certainly wouldn't be going to Smeltings in the fall as Dudley and Piers would, and he had a sneaking suspicion that the other members of Dudley's gang wouldn't bother with him if Dudley wasn't there to egg them on.

 _I'd prefer Hogwarts, but if that doesn't turn out to be true, Stonewall High might not be so bad._ As he so often had, he unfolded the sheet of paper listing the writing classes on it. _The hardest thing for any author is supposed to be coming up with the world, and I've got one all ready to go._ He grinned to himself. _Runs in the family, even. The Townhouse where my dad's mysteries are set is the same one where he grew up, and a lot of the characters in his books are based on people he knew then, only he's changed enough things about them that they don't know themselves. And he says some of them have even read his books, and when he gets fan letters from them, the character they hate most is always the one he based on them!_

With a glance at the sun, he started back towards Privet Drive. Aunt Petunia and Dudley had been in London most of the day to buy Dudley's uniform for Smeltings, which had meant a day at Mrs. Figg's for Harry. This hadn't been so bad as it usually was, especially since Harry had his story-work to keep him busy, but he'd needed a few minutes out in the fresh air to make sure he'd be able to keep a straight face. He'd seen a few pictures of Uncle Vernon in the Smeltings uniform, and just the thought of Dudley got up in the same way was already making him smile.

* * *

"Say it again," gasped Pearl, tears of laughter rolling down her face. "Oh, s-s-say it again!"

"Maroon tail coat," said Henry carefully, sketching this garment in the air with his hands. His mother helpfully drew her wand and filled in the outline with the proper color and shape. "Orange knickerbockers." These, too, appeared. Aunt Gigi had a hand over her mouth, Uncle John was shaking his head and chuckling, and Jeanie had her face buried in her sleeve. Mal looked as cool as any cucumber, but Henry had seen the telltale quivers at the corners of his cousin's eyes. "And a flat little boater hat, the straw kind with the ribbon."

"Now, does the ribbon match the tail coat?" inquired Henry's dad, in the voice of one wishing to get a necessary point clear. "Or the knickerbockers?"

"Both. It's striped." Henry nodded, repressing a grin of his own as this detail appeared on the midair sketch. "And then there's the stick. Knobbly sort of thing, supposed to be used for…I don't know. What they really get used for is hitting each other."

"And to top it all off…" Thea added Dudley's fat face and blond hair between hat and coat, and ballooned the formerly slim figure into grotesque proportions. "Is that about right, Henry?"

"That's what I saw." Henry took a step back, looked over the form of his dream cousin, and burst into the guffaws he'd had to contain earlier that evening at Privet Drive. Pearl was rolling on the floor, barely able to get her breath, and Mal finally cracked and began to snicker.

From across the room, Ryan caught Henry's eye, and nodded towards the hallway. When Henry had his breath back, he followed his father, stepping out of easy earshot of the merry group in the main room.

"I just wanted to remind you," Ryan said quietly, looking down at Henry. "It's getting pretty close to the time when that letter ought to be coming. You remember what to do, right?"

"Hide it," Henry recited. "Keep it safe. Don't open it."

"Good, and then?"

"Go outside early the next morning." Henry glanced back towards where his family had begun adding even more ridiculous embellishments to Dudley's uniform. "Why do I have to have that life anyway?" he asked, wincing at how petulant his voice sounded, but he'd begun and he might as well finish. "I wish I didn't."

"Yeah, you and a lot of other people, kid." His father reached over and ruffled his hair. "But hey, at least we've got this place too, right?"

"We do." Henry looked up at his dad and smiled. "And that makes up for a lot."

* * *

Harry almost missed the click of the mail slot and the flop of letters on the doormat the next morning at Privet Drive, as Dudley was busy banging his Smelting stick on the table. He recognized it in time, though, to be already out of his chair before Uncle Vernon had said more than "Get the mail."

Three things lay on the doormat: a postcard from Uncle Vernon's sister Marge, who was vacationing on the Isle of Wight, a brown envelope that looked like a bill, and—

Picking up the third thing and staring at it, Harry felt a smile bigger than any he'd ever experienced in either life spreading over his face.

The letter in his hand was addressed in bright green ink to "Mr. H. Potter, The Cupboard Under the Stairs, 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey".

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) for making available the text of E. Nesbit's _Five Children and It_ , which seemed like a good candidate for a book that might well be in Harry's school library and battered enough to be given away, but didn't have a title which would immediately clue in the Dursleys that Harry shouldn't have it.
> 
> Apologies for the wait for this chapter. I've been dealing with a feverish cold. Next time, we really and truly get Harry's response to his Hogwarts letter, and who comes out to deal with it. What, if anything, will they wish about this whole messy situation? Stay tuned to find out!


	4. The Letters from Someone

"Hurry up out there, boy!" Uncle Vernon bellowed from the kitchen. "What're you doing, checking for letter bombs?" He chortled at his own joke.

Snapped out of his reverie by this, Harry hastily thrust his letter inside his shirt (given that this garment had first belonged to Dudley, he could have hidden a week's worth of mail without trouble, and possibly a baby elephant as well) and returned to the kitchen with the other two items. Uncle Vernon tore open the bill, snorted at its contents, and flipped the postcard over.

"Marge's ill," he informed the room at large. "Ate a funny whelk."

"That's too bad," said Harry in a voice that didn't quite sound like his own. "I'm not feeling well either. Can I go and lie down?"

Uncle Vernon waved a dismissive hand, and Harry made good his escape, dodging Dudley's playful parting blow with the Smeltings stick. Safely inside his cupboard, he buried his face in his pillow and vented his feelings in a short, muffled yell before extracting the letter to have another look at it by the light from the vent in the door.

 _My letter. My Hogwarts letter._ Reverently, he ran a finger along the seal of purple wax with its crest of lion, eagle, badger, and serpent surmounted by the large capital H, before turning it over to grin at his name and the very accurate direction written underneath it. _It's real, it's really and truly real, the dreams were right all along—_

But, Harry had to admit, the dreams' accuracy on this one point didn't say anything about their relationship to reality. If his mother really had been a witch, and if Aunt Petunia remembered the coming of her sister's Hogwarts letter and had warned her husband about what might be coming in its turn for Harry, then his mind could easily have had this information tucked away in some far corner, and chosen the adults of his dream family as the method of delivering it.

 _So I'm using what I learned in the dreams to argue that the dreams aren't real._ Sliding his letter into the box of his clothes for safekeeping, Harry sat up carefully, flipped his pillow to the cool side, and lay down again. _Sounds like Mal-logic to me. Trouble is, even when it's hard to follow the corkscrews Mal's thoughts went through to get where they are, he has this annoying little habit of being right…_

* * *

"Albatross!"

Henry jumped what felt like a mile as his dad strode in the front door with an incredibly large white-feathered bird in his arms. "Albatross!" Ryan repeated in the carrying tone of a professional vendor at a sports arena or entertainment complex.

"Two choc-ices, please," said Aunt Gigi promptly, stepping around the corner from the kitchen.

Ryan cast her a look of contemptuous distaste. "I haven't got choc-ices. I've only got this albatross. Albatross!"

Henry groaned under his breath as he recognized the source material, but sat back to watch nonetheless. Mal and Uncle John had come up from the basement, drawn by the noise, and he could see his mom heading inside from her garden through the back window. Pearl and Jeanie were ensconced in the mouth of the hallway leading back to the bedrooms, whispering together in excitement.

"What flavor is it?" asked Aunt Gigi, peering more closely at the bird, which was watching her warily.

"It's a bird, isn't it?" Ryan looked as though he had never been asked a more stupid question in his life. "It's a bloomin' seabird. It's bleedin' albatross flavor!"

"They're not really going to eat you," Uncle John put in, addressing the albatross, which was starting to look alarmed. "They're just being silly."

"Silly? Them?" Mal gasped and clutched at his chest. "I think I might faint!"

"Good thing we've got a Healer on hand, then." Henry nodded to his mom, who was just shutting the glass door behind herself. "Pediatrician, too. Double certification."

"How about you let me do my own bragging?" requested Thea, but she was smiling.

"Do you get wafers with it?" Aunt Gigi was asking now, sliding her hands under the bird to unfasten something which had apparently been tied to one of its legs.

"Of course you don't get wafers with it!" Ryan shifted the balance of the weight in his arms so that Gigi could get more easily at what she was aiming for. "Albatross!"

Jeanie and Pearl dissolved entirely into giggles at the thoroughly disgusted look the seabird was now giving Ryan.

"How much is it, then?" Henry's aunt withdrew her hand, now holding a flat packet wrapped up in what looked like some kind of waterproof cloth.

"Ninepence." Ryan glanced over at Uncle John, who drew his wand and conjured a sturdy perch onto which the albatross could sidle. "Thanks," Henry's dad said, splitting the remark equally between the seabird and his best friend. "Pearl, get him some water, will you? He's come a long way. And where's my ninepence, woman?" he demanded of Aunt Gigi.

Aunt Gigi plunged her free hand into the pocket of her jeans and withdrew a slim, silver coin. "Here's a dime," she said, tossing it to Ryan. "Keep the change."

"What kind of letters need a bird as big as an albatross to deliver them?" asked Pearl, returning from the sink with a deep bowl of water between her hands. Uncle John quickly added a stand to the perch where the bowl could rest, and Pearl set it down there. "They don't look all that heavy."

"It's not that they're heavy, love." Thea pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down. "It's just that they've come a very long way."

"Like across the ocean?" Jeanie bounced on her toes, her mile-wide grin matching the satisfied smirk on Mal's face, and the eager smile Henry could feel beginning on his own. "From a magical castle by a lake?"

"Perhaps." Aunt Gigi chuckled, undoing the outer wrappings and pulling them away. Three letters addressed in green ink were revealed in a tidy pile. "Now, let's see here. How have they done this—ah, I see, alphabetically. That does make sense. Which means that right on top we have Mr. H. Blake, The Upper Bunk, Front Corner Bedroom, 2319 Tudor Lane, Creedsdale, Pennsylvania." With a flick of her wrist, she sent the precious packet spinning across the table to Henry. "Catch."

Henry snagged the letter out of the air and spent a long moment looking at it, savoring the fact of its existence, everything it meant, and everything it didn't mean. Jeanie had come forward to claim her own letter (addressed to her at "The Large Bed") and Mal was just holding out his hand for his when Henry looked up again.

"That's nice to see," said Henry's cousin, turning around his letter so that everyone could see its bold green direction, which began "Mr. M. Reynolds, The Lower Bunk" before continuing as had the other two.

"What is—oh, your name?" Uncle John shrugged, coming to stand beside his son. "It's accurate. Now, in any case." He glanced across at Aunt Gigi, who was hiding a smile behind her hand. "And I'll accept a certain share of responsibility for that, but I refuse to take it all. One of us did actually know the fact we were missing that night, or could have found it out without very much effort…"

"Why bother?" Henry's dad turned one of the armchairs from the living room to face the kitchen instead and sat down in it, Pearl skipping over to curl up on her father's lap. "I was right, wasn't I? We couldn't have held onto it, not without raising a lot more eyebrows than we have."

"And the person most closely concerned thanks you heartily for not bothering." Mal stroked his finger around the Hogwarts seal, allowing it to rest a little longer on the badger than on any other of the heraldic animals. "Dealing with it in my dreams is going to be bad enough. I don't need it in real life."

"And while we're talking about names, we're not opening letters," said Jeanie pointedly, her own fingers already under her letter's flap. "Do you mind if we get on with it?"

"On the count of three, then." Henry got his hand into position and prepared to pull. "One…two…"

* * *

A crash from the kitchen startled Harry awake. Under his breath, he swore, a series of words gleaned from the last time his dad had skinned his knuckles while working in the yard, guaranteed to make his mom or his aunt smack him on the side of the head if they should catch him using that kind of language.

_I was going to see what's in the letters. Even if it isn't the same from world to world, I would've had some idea what to expect. Now I won't…_

One of his mother's calming exercises came to mind, and he drew in a long breath while counting to four, let it out to the count of five, and rested, with his lungs empty, for a slow count of three before repeating the cycle twice more.

 _It's only for today,_ he reminded himself when he thought himself would listen.

 _But it's agony to wait!_ wailed himself, in a voice which reminded Harry strongly of Pearl in her least rational and most histrionic mood. The comparison made him smile, and some of his impatience trickled away with the amusement.

_I've waited the better part of eleven years. I can wait one more day._

_Besides, if the dreams are true—and it's looking more and more like at least some parts of them are—I already know, pretty closely, what's in that letter. What I need to be thinking about now is how I'm going to answer it._

Harry would have been the first to admit that his situation with the Dursleys was far from ideal, but the idea of pouring out his tale of woe in a school acceptance letter rubbed him the wrong way. With the adults of his dream-life to aid him, he could even, tentatively, sympathize with his relatives' views. They hadn't wanted anything to do with magic, they'd set up their lives to avoid having to so much as think about magic, and then he'd been quite literally dumped on their doorstep, dragging magic back into their lives whether they wanted it that way or not.

_So I want to keep them out of this as far as possible, because if they get even a sniff of it they'll start throwing up walls like mad. Which means I need to come up with a good, believable reason why they can't be the ones taking me to get my school supplies, and then to catch the train to school in September._

Rolling onto his side, Harry contemplated the Dursleys' lives, both as they were and as they would have been if he had never been involved. _I suppose I could make a case that Uncle Vernon's work keeps him pretty busy. And then Aunt Petunia has everything to do to get Dudley ready for Smeltings, along with all the housework and keeping up her social round…_

* * *

"Her social round? Really?" Jeanie sniffed. "Around here, we call that being a gossipy old biddy and a Peeping Tom. Or Thomasina, I guess."

"Give the lady a break." Mal sliced avocado neatly to go on sandwiches for lunch. "She doesn't have anything else to keep her busy, does she? Especially not with a handy nephew to do three-quarters of that housework for her."

"Yes, but _we don't talk about that_." Henry lifted his nose into the air and primmed up his mouth. "I don't know," he said, abandoning the pose once he'd gotten the expected round of laughter and sliding another four slices of bread into the toaster oven. "It just feels sort of manipulative to bring all of that into it. Like I'm asking for pity, and I'm not. Honestly, I'd rather nobody knew what it's like at the Dursleys. People are going to stare at me enough for being The Boy Who Lived. I don't need to be the Poor Little Orphan Boy too."

"Maybe, whoever comes to take you to Diagon Alley, you can get them to shrink your clothes so they fit right," suggested Pearl, swinging her feet against the legs of her chair as she portioned out corn chips into bowls. "And fix your glasses. Didn't you say they were all taped up, because Dudley likes to punch you?"

"Yeah, they are." Henry took off the glasses he was currently wearing, regarding them critically. "They look pretty much like these, except for being broken in the middle, so I'd be just fine if somebody did a quick _Reparo_ on them."

"Talking about your gray life?" asked Aunt Gigi, coming inside from the deck with a basket full of fresh tomatoes on her arm. "That's how I always think about your dreams, Henry, from the way you describe them to us. Like the beginning of _The Wizard of Oz_ , before Dorothy blows away in the tornado. All black and white and gray, no color to them anywhere."

"Would that make Daddy Toto?" Pearl grinned sweetly. "I don't think you could carry him in your basket, Henry!"

"That's not the real question here." Mal turned his head, regarding his cousin critically. "The real question here is, how well would Henry pull off that blue check outfit with the frilly little apron?"

"Oh, thank you _so_ much for _those_ images." Jeanie ground the heels of her hands into her closed eyes. "I'm probably never getting that out of my head now!"

"So try this one instead." Aunt Gigi began to wash the tomatoes at the kitchen sink. "Henry Gale in blue jean overalls and a checked shirt, with his very big Toto by his side. And his flying house landed on the Wicked Wizard of the East and flattened him, but the Wicked Wizard isn't really dead and he's going to want revenge, so the Good Witch of the North sends Henry on a journey to find the Wonderful Wizard of Warts." She paused, smiling smugly. " _Hog_ warts, that is," she drawled in an exaggerated back-country accent, to the accompaniment of a foursome of groans from her audience.

"Good Witch of the North?" Henry asked when he could be heard again, bringing his plate of bread to the table and helping himself to a piece of apple from the pile Jeanie had run through the ingenious little machine which cored, peeled, and sliced them all at once. "Who would that be?"

"I'll let you figure that out for yourself." Aunt Gigi blotted several of the prettier tomatoes dry and added them to the growing piles of sandwich fixings. "But I have a funny feeling you might be meeting her sooner than you think, Henry, at least if you play your cards right. So, what _are_ you planning to say in that letter?"

* * *

What he was planning to say in that letter was much on Harry's mind at six o'clock the next morning as he stood outside the front door of number four, Privet Drive. The broken alarm clock he'd found in Dudley's second bedroom had proved to be repairable, which was how he could be so sure that it was currently six o'clock.

He wished he could be sure of anything else.

_What if there really isn't any such place as Hogwarts? What if this is all some kind of prank, something Dudley dreamed up to make me look stupid? Not that I think he's that smart, some mornings he still has trouble figuring out which feet his shoes go on, but it's a possibility. Or what if there is such a place as Hogwarts, but I'm not permitted to go there for some reason? What if there's been a mistake and they mean another Harry Potter? What if—what if—_

Movement against the lightening sky caught his eye. High above Privet Drive, a broad-bodied bird soared. Now it was circling, preparing to dive—and it was carrying something in its beak—

Hardly daring to breathe, Harry held up his wrist, and the tawny-feathered owl settled onto it, dropping a parchment envelope into his other hand.

_Or what if I'm being stupid, and it really is true after all?_

The owl's talons pricked lightly against his skin as it bobbed its head at him. "Thanks," Harry said, glancing at the letter just long enough to see that it was addressed as yesterday's had been, cupboard and all. "There'll be an answer. Can you wait for it?"

A low hoot and another bob of the head greeted this, and the owl pushed off his wrist to flap its way ponderously over to one of the tall hedges from which Privet Drive took its name. Harry watched it until it settled onto its new perch, then hurried inside, being careful to close the door softly behind himself. Waking the Dursleys at the stage of the game would be worse than having never received the letter at all.

After a stop at his cupboard for pen, paper, and envelope, he sat down at the kitchen table and broke the seal, sliding the two pieces of parchment free almost reverently. The first one he opened was the supply list, which made him smile as he looked down its matter-of-fact listing of things like a pair of dragon hide gloves, a book entitled _A Beginners' Guide to Transfiguration_ by someone named Emeric Switch, a cauldron (pewter, standard size 2), and an owl OR a cat OR a toad.

_I'm almost tempted to leave it where Dudley can find it, just to watch him try to make sense out of it. It would cause more problems than it would solve, I know, but it would be really funny…_

Setting the list aside for further study later, he opened the letter, which was written in green on the letterhead of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore, Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorc., Chf. Warlock, Supreme Mugwump, International Confed. of Wizards).

_Dear Mr. Potter,_

_We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment._

_Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July._

_Yours sincerely,_

_Minerva McGonagall,_

_Deputy Headmistress_

"It's true." Harry found his hands shaking as he lifted them from the table. "It's all true. Every bit of it. I'm a wizard, and I'm going away to school, and I'm going to learn magic, real magic. I might never even have to come back here again!" No sooner had these words left his mouth, though, than he grimaced and shook his head. "Holidays. I'll have to be back for the holidays. Though I suppose if I make friends, nothing says I can't go and stay with them, at least for part of the time…"

A passing car on the street outside reminded Harry that his time was limited. Quickly pulling a clean sheet of paper towards himself, he picked up his pen and began to write.

_Dear Professor McGonagall,_

_I will be very happy to come to Hogwarts, but I could use some advice on the subject of my school supplies. My uncle's work is always very demanding, and my aunt has been spending a great deal of time this summer getting my cousin ready to go away to school, so I don't like to ask them to take time out of their busy lives to go and buy my equipment and books. Also, since we are not a magical family, I think we might have some trouble finding the shops that sell these items._

_Any help you can give me will be greatly appreciated._

_Yours sincerely,_

_Harry Potter_

After reading over his reply once more, Harry folded it, tucked it into an envelope, sealed it shut, and wrote "Professor M. McGonagall" on the front. Scooping up both his open letter and his writing supplies, he went back to the door and stepped out.

The owl swooped back over to him as soon as he held up his arm, and gently took the letter from his hand. "Thanks," Harry said again, and the owl hooted once more (the sound rather muffled by the envelope in its beak) before pushing off strongly, flapping hard to gain altitude. Harry watched it out of sight, no longer bothering to contain his smile.

 _It worked. It_ worked _. I'm going to Hogwarts, Hogwarts, Hoggy Warty Hogwarts…_

Dancing a little to the tune these words evoked in his head, he went back inside, careful one last time to shut the front door firmly, yet quietly.

_Now all I have to do is the hardest thing in the world._

_Now all I have to do is wait._

* * *

Harry's care to be the first one to the door when the mail was delivered the next day seemed at first to be unnecessary, but as he gathered up the handful of letters and postcards (Aunt Petunia's friend Yvonne was having a wonderful time in Majorca, while Uncle Vernon's sister Marge was still ill from her run-in with the funny whelk on the Isle of Wight), an envelope small enough to fit into the palm of his hand fell out of the middle of the stack. It was addressed, in green, to "Mr. H. Potter". With a grin, Harry stuffed it into his pocket and returned to the kitchen with the rest of the mail.

Breakfast had never seemed to take so long, but finally Dudley gobbled the last of his third helping of eggs and bacon to hurry outside at a shout from Piers, Aunt Petunia abandoned the bit of toast she'd been crumbling in favor of the ringing telephone, Uncle Vernon straightened his tie at the mirror in the hall and bustled out the door with his briefcase, and Harry was left in sole possession of the kitchen, free to open his tiny letter and read its contents.

_Mr. Potter —_

_Yours received and contents noted._

_Expect further action in this matter by 31 July._

— _M. McGonagall_

Harry had just begun to feel cheated when he noticed, in even tinier letters underneath the signature, an inscription so small that he had to squint at it to make it out.

_P.S. I never thought much of your relatives._

Hastily turning his snort of laughter into a cough as Aunt Petunia came back into the room, Harry crammed the letter back into his pocket and got to his feet. "Should I do the dishes now?" he asked.

"Yes, and then you can start on the windows. They're filthy. Mind you don't leave streaks all over them like you did last time…"

* * *

The days which followed were some of the longest Harry had ever experienced, even counting the ones he'd spent in his cupboard being punished. In his cupboard, at least, he could close his eyes and hope to slide away to his other life, but Aunt Petunia disapproved of naps on principle, especially when Harry could be doing something useful around the house, so that particular escape was barred to him during daylight hours.

Wandering the neighborhood and avoiding Dudley was still one of the best options available, and Harry combined it, after the first endless-seeming day, with an exercise Henry's dad had suggested. "Observation is one of the writer's best tools," Ryan had said with his quick, cheerful grin. "Look around you and imagine you have to describe what you're seeing so that someone else who's never seen it can get a good clear idea of it. Don't include every single detail, or people will feel like they're drowning, but always throw in one or two interesting ones. Four birds on a streetlight looking the same direction and one looking the other way, maybe, or a tree with a funny-shaped branch poking out of its top."

The next night, looking over the notes he'd begun keeping in a small blank book he'd removed from Dudley's second bedroom at the same time as the alarm clock, Harry frowned. He'd tried to find the interesting details in every place he'd stopped to work on his descriptions, and three of them, though he hadn't noticed it at the time, were the same.

_There was a cat. A tabby cat, with markings around its eyes like square spectacles. I saw it first near Mrs. Figg's house, that's why I didn't think anything of it, but then it was sitting underneath the slide at the park, and then beside the street sign on the corner only a block from here…_

He saw the cat twice again on the following day, and four times the day after that, which happened to be Sunday. Monday was a day entirely free of felines, spectacle-marked or any other kind, and Harry went to bed feeling slightly abandoned.

 _Which makes no sense,_ he lectured himself as his eyes closed. _It's a cat. Cats do whatever they want. Just because it seemed to be following me around, doesn't mean it really was…_

* * *

"A tabby with spectacle markings?" Uncle John inspected a bit of the reinforcing woodwork on the well-secured basement room known to Blakes and Reynolds alike as the Doghouse. "And you've seen it how many times now?"

"Eight, I think. Something like that." Henry took a step back as his uncle drew his wand. "Why? Is it dangerous?"

"Not dangerous, exactly." Swirling his wand three times counterclockwise, Uncle John waited until the piece of wood he was repairing glowed gold, then rapped it twice sharply. "Though I certainly don't want to hear you've been throwing rocks at it."

"I wouldn't do that!" Henry protested, stung. "Dudley likes doing that to _me!_ "

"In which case, you should be fine. And that is all I have to say on that subject." Uncle John stepped back and slid his wand away again. "There, that looks solid. What do you say we see who's up for a few innings of crosseball down in the woods? We won't have full teams, obviously, but we could set up some spell-constructs to fly the bases for us…"

* * *

The doorbell rang in the middle of breakfast the next morning, startling Dudley into spewing a half-chewed bite of cornflakes all over the kitchen table. Harry was about to duck into the hallway while Uncle Vernon pounded Dudley on the back, but Aunt Petunia hissed at him, shoved a wet cloth into his hand, and went to answer the door herself.

Harry tried to focus his hearing towards the door as he wiped the mess off the table, but all he could catch were bits and snatches, spoken in a woman's strong voice: "…Stonewall High…incoming class…unusual tendencies…further testing…" As he dumped the bits of cornflake into the bin under the sink, he heard two sets of footsteps coming back.

"Here he is," said Aunt Petunia's voice, higher than usual with nervousness, and her hand closed tightly around Harry's arm. "How long did you say you'd need him? All day?"

"If it's entirely convenient, of course," said the voice Harry had heard at the door, a voice that made it clear the speaker was used to getting her own way in most things and saw no reason why this occasion should be different.

"Of course, that's perfectly fine. Take all the time you need." Aunt Petunia yanked on Harry's arm, spinning him around, and he saw the other woman to whom she'd been speaking for the first time. She was tall, with black hair pulled back into a tight bun, and Harry had the immediate impression that this would not be a safe person to cross. "Harry, this is Miss—I'm terribly sorry, I didn't quite catch the name?"

"McGrath." Green eyes behind square-framed spectacles looked Harry up and down. "Harry is your nephew, I believe, Mrs. Dursley?"

"Yes, my sister's child. Left in our care after she died."

"Very good." Miss McGrath nodded once. "I'll have him back to you in time for dinner. Come along, Harry."

Swallowing against a dozen questions he wanted to ask, Harry followed the woman along the hallway and out into the bright, sunny morning. Somewhere in the back of his mind, bits of story from his dream-parents were starting to slot into place, descriptions of a professor under whom they had studied at Hogwarts, whose one very special ability had influenced his dad more than almost anyone had ever known…

After they had rounded two corners, Miss McGrath stopped short and looked down at Harry. "That went rather well, don't you think?" she said with a small smile. "Please, allow me to introduce myself a bit more truly." She extended her hand. "Professor Minerva McGonagall, of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that this story has such a firm grasp on me right now. Possibly both. The only other two stories that have ever done this to me are my first serious fanfiction, _Living with Danger_ , and my first original novel, _A Widow in Waiting_. Both seemed to turn out well, so here's hoping!
> 
> I do disclaim any and all quotes from the actual Harry Potter books, or from other sources you may think you recognize (the bit about albatrosses is a direct steal from _Monty Python's Flying Circus_ , for anyone who's wondering). I'm having a great deal of fun making this story highly geek-a-riffic and hope you are enjoying it as well.
> 
> Next time: Harry's trip to Diagon Alley takes an unusual turn when he goes to get his robes fitted… stay tuned!


	5. Madam Malkin's

With effort, Harry suppressed a grin. "Harry Potter, Professor," he said, taking the hand offered to him. "But you knew that."  


"I did, and would have even if we'd met under different circumstances." The Professor shook his hand firmly and released it. "You're very like your father, although you have your mother's eyes. But I'm sure you knew that."

Weighing truth, lies, dreams, reality, Harry decided on a middle course. "I didn't, really," he said. "I haven't ever seen a picture of them, or heard very much about them. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia don't like to talk about…you know. That sort of thing."

"I see." Professor McGonagall nodded once, though her lips were very thin. "Well, then, let me be the first to say it, though I'm sure I won't be the last. You look almost exactly like James Potter as I remember him when he arrived for his first year at Hogwarts. But your eyes…" She touched the side of Harry's chin lightly, and he looked up, startled. "Yes, Lily Evans's eyes to the life. No one who knew your parents will ever doubt who you are."

Harry grimaced before he could stop himself, and Professor McGonagall frowned. "Is something the matter?"

"No," said Harry automatically, and found himself on the receiving end of a piercing green glare, very like that of the tabby cat he'd seen so many times over the past few days. "A little," he emended. "Professor…am I famous? Did I do something, or have something happen to me, that means people would know who I am?"

Professor McGonagall exhaled, her expression flickering through exasperation and satisfaction before settling on determination. "And this," she said, more to herself than to Harry, "is what comes of leaving people letters."

With a little shake of her head, she brought her attention back to Harry. "Yes," she said shortly. "Yes, Harry, you are quite famous. As for whether you did something or had something happen to you, that has been a matter of debate for a number of years. But we'll have our entire trip to London to discuss that, and…" She trailed off, looking Harry up and down. "Why are you wearing those things?" she demanded, gesturing to the T-shirt which fell almost to Harry's knees and the jeans he'd had to turn up four times and tie around his waist with a bit of rope.

Harry shrugged. "Because everything else I have is bigger."

"You get what your cousin's finished with, I assume? Don't answer that," Professor McGonagall added before Harry could say anything. "I have eyes. But I refuse to take you to London looking like a ragamuffin out of Charles Dickens. Hold still."

Seemingly from nowhere, a slim rod of wood sprang into her hand, and Harry stared in awe. He'd seen such things as magic wands and arm-holsters for them in his dreams, but to have them confirmed in real life sent his heart jumping into his throat, even as he held obediently still.

The Professor swirled her wand once around his form, then slashed it right and left, ending with a delicate tap against the taped-up bridge of Harry's glasses. With a little rustle of cloth, the shirt and jeans shrank to fit him comfortably, and the glasses vibrated once, all over, before settling back into place (Harry had to fight the urge to sneeze). Professor McGonagall glanced down, made a sound like "Hmph", and waved her wand across Harry's battered trainers as well, repairing the places where they'd been starting to fray. "There," she said, starting to tuck her wand back into her sleeve. "Much better." She paused, then conjured a full-length mirror beside them. "What do you think?" she asked, waving Harry towards it.

A grin like the ones Henry often wore sprang to Harry's face as he inspected his reflection. In his newly fitted red shirt and blue jeans, well-worn but serviceable trainers, and round-framed glasses now missing their tape, he looked more like his dream counterpart than ever.

_Except for the skin and such, but who cares about that._

"It looks great, Professor," he said, smiling up at her. "Thanks."

"Not at all." Professor McGonagall flicked her wand in the opposite direction, making the mirror disappear, and slid her wand away again. "Come along, Harry. We wouldn't want to miss the train."

"The train?" Harry hurried to keep up with the Professor's swift strides. "Don't…people like us have other ways to get around?"

"We do, but why waste a perfectly good train which is going our way in any case?" Professor McGonagall glanced down at him. "I won't lie to you," she said. "There are people in the magical world who are the equivalent of your aunt and uncle, only the other way about. Hostile towards what they don't understand, either contemptuous of it or frightened by it. But that's a part of your story, so I won't go much further into it quite yet. I'll only say that I have never considered Muggle things—non-magical," she added explanatorily, "to be inherently worse than magical ones. Occasionally they're even better. But that, too, can wait. Have you had breakfast?"

"Breakfast?" Harry had to work to get his mind back that far. The kitchen of number four, Privet Drive, already seemed like a distant memory. "Ah, no. I'd just finished doing the sausages when you got there, so I hadn't had a chance to eat yet."

"Hadn't you." Professor McGonagall's curious sequence of expressions flickered across her face again. "Well, there's no reason you should go to London hungry. There ought to be at least a sandwich shop in the train station, and I'd imagine they should have something you'd like…"

* * *

Ten minutes later, Harry sat beside Professor McGonagall in a pair of seats on a train bound for London, a bacon-egg-and-cheese wrap in his hand and a covered cup of orange juice beside him. Professor McGonagall had done something else with her wand—"a spell a colleague taught me," she'd explained briefly, "to help keep private conversations private"—and was now checking over the pages of a small book.

Harry bit into his wrap, catching a bit of bacon which had tried to escape, and tried to get his thoughts in order while he chewed. It wasn't easy. Most of his mind was taken up with a jubilant chant of _I'm going to London, and then I'm going to wizard school, and the Dursleys don't know anything about it…_

The conductor came by to check on their tickets. As Professor McGonagall handed them over, a horrible thought occurred to Harry.

"Professor," he said when the conductor had walked away again. "I…I don't think I have any money. To buy what I'll need, I mean." Another thought followed close on the heels of the first. "And I forgot my letter, with the supplies list in it. It's back in—where I sleep, at my aunt and uncle's house."

"I'd thought of that, as it happens." Professor McGonagall extracted a familiar-looking object from one of her pockets. "It seemed unlikely you'd be carrying it on your person, and I didn't want to give your relatives any time to think about what I was doing, so I brought a spare. Though I do have to ask." She held out the letter, tapping her finger against the second line of the address, underneath Harry's name. "Is this entirely accurate?"

Rather than answer, Harry took another bite of his wrap, and Professor McGonagall sighed. "I'll take that as a yes," she said, returning the letter to her pocket. "As for money, I think this would be a good time to discuss certain realities of the wizarding world. Such as a bank called Gringotts, at which most magical families maintain a vault. Including yours, Harry." From another pocket, she removed a small golden key. "If your aunt and uncle had ever bothered to apply to us, they could have had any amount of money, within reason, that they needed to take care of you. But I suppose some people simply glory in being martyrs, even when it's unnecessary."

Harry swallowed, which was a little harder than usual. His face didn't seem to want to let go of its smile. "So my dad's family was magical, then?" he asked when he had his mouth clear to speak. "And my mum's wasn't?"

"Right on both counts." Professor McGonagall settled back in her seat, picking up the cup of tea she'd bought herself along with Harry's wrap and juice. "There have been magical Potters for a very long time, but your mother was what's called a Muggleborn. Her parents, and her sister, as you're well aware, were all completely un-magical. No one knows quite how or why Muggleborn wizards and witches occur, but most people whose parents, either one or both, were magical themselves are perfectly willing to welcome Muggleborns into magical society." Her lips pursed briefly. "Most of them."

"But some of them don't," Harry finished. He'd long since learned, in both his personas, to hear what wasn't being said between the words of what was. "Was it one of those who…"

"Killed your parents? Yes." Professor McGonagall's eyes gazed past Harry, into the distance outside the window, but she wasn't looking at the scenery.

"You were born into the middle of a war, Harry," the Professor said at last. "Like all wars, it had a reason for beginning, but this one was even less pardonable than most. A man, if we may call him that, saw an opportunity to gain power in the closed-mindedness of the families who have been magical for a long time, who pride themselves on that fact and call themselves pureblood. He painted himself to them as the great champion for whom they'd been waiting, who would sweep away from our world the elements they consider undesirable and place them in the positions of power they believe they should hold, by right of having magical ancestors. And to better strike fear into the hearts of these 'undesirables', he took a name for himself."

"A name?" Harry picked up his orange juice. "What does a name have to do with anything?"

"Names have meaning, Harry." Professor McGonagall glanced over at him and smiled briefly. "Like yours. 'Leader of armies'. But this man's name had more to do with renouncing any real humanity he might ever have possessed, and spreading terror by giving the impression that he truly was something not quite human. Even today, when he has been gone—thanks to you—for nearly ten years, few wizards and witches dare to say his name out loud."

"Thanks to me?" Harry couldn't quite get his mind around this, though in the back of his head he heard murmurs of a story in his dad's and uncle's voices, a story about his birth parents and a cottage in a place called Godric's Hollow and a powerful, complicated spell. "But—what _is_ his name? Or what was it?"

Professor McGonagall's face was very still. "Voldemort," she said at last, with a small exhalation of distaste. " _Lord_ Voldemort, as he styled himself, though only his followers ever called him that. But I would recommend you not say either version aloud in any public place. He was generally spoken of as You-Know-Who, or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named." A tiny spark of laughter lit in her eyes. "To give him his more formal title."

Harry buried his answering laugh in his juice cup. "So _he_ killed my parents?" he asked. "Because they wouldn't do what he wanted?"

"They would not," Professor McGonagall confirmed. "And neither would they stand aside and let him kill you. But after they were both dead, when he turned his wand on you…" She shifted to face him. "The Killing Curse has never been known to fail," she said. "Not if the caster can find enough hatred or anger in his soul, and You-Know-Who had those in plenty. But somehow, when he attempted to kill you, Harry, the curse had different effects than it had ever had before. It left you alive and well, marked only…" She lifted her hand to her own forehead, and Harry brushed his fringe aside to expose his lightning-bolt scar. "Yes, with that. And You-Know-Who vanished from that night. No one has seen or heard of him from that day to this."

"What about his followers?" Harry let his fringe fall back into place and picked up his wrap again. "What happened to them?"

"Some were arrested for their crimes, and sent to the wizarding prison, Azkaban. Others claimed they had been forced to do what they did, placed under the Imperius Curse, which subjects one person to the will of another." Professor McGonagall sniffed. "A great many of those claims were not checked very strictly, I'm sorry to say. The Ministry of Magic wanted to suppress any further unpleasantness. All the more reason for you to be careful what you say, Harry, and who you say it to. Some of the other students in your year, or already attending Hogwarts, may well share their parents' sympathies."

Harry gulped a little, and Professor McGonagall sighed. "Not the way I'd wanted to introduce you to things, but I felt you should be warned ahead of time. Now, there must be a great deal you want to know." She smiled again, her eyes softening with the expression. "Where shall we start? With your parents?"

"Yes, please, Professor." Harry brushed crumbs off his knee. "Did you know them?"

"I did. We first met when they were my students, at Hogwarts, both in my subject of Transfiguration and as members of Gryffindor House, which I head. We have four Houses at Hogwarts, into which students are sorted based on their personalities and what they want most in life…"

* * *

By the time the train reached London, Harry's head was swimming a little, though not, he suspected, nearly as badly as Professor McGonagall might think. For every fact she told him, two more popped up inside his mind, spoken in voices he had never heard with his waking ears but all of which, astoundingly, seemed to be true. When she mentioned that Gringotts, the wizarding bank, was run by goblins, to Harry's horror he found himself blurting, "Oh, like—" and had to take a hasty bite of his wrap to cover. He didn't think he was up to explaining that his imaginary adoptive mother had an equally fictitious aunt named Amy who worked at Noxet Bank, the American equivalent to Gringotts.

 _Though that might explain how we all ended up in America, in the dreams._ Harry followed Professor McGonagall out of the train station and towards the nearest Underground stop. _If Mom, Thea, whatever I want to call her, has family there, and they were trying to protect me because I'm The Boy Who Lived…_

The thought of family and protection funneled him back to Professor McGonagall explaining that he'd been sent to live with the Dursleys precisely because they were his only living relatives, that the ties of blood had made it easier for magical protections to be set up. "If I'd intended you harm, I wouldn't even have been able to approach the house, much less walk in the front door," she'd said. "I'd imagine there have been quite a few attacks warded off through the years without your aunt and uncle ever knowing anything about them."

 _But if they had known, they'd probably have pitched me out the door and figured they were well rid of me._ Harry watched the lights flicker on the walls of the Underground. Professor McGonagall had returned to her little book, but Harry was sure she was keeping her ears open for the announcements of stops and stations. _Not all families take care of each other the way mine does…_

 _Henry's, I mean. The way Henry's does._ Impatiently, Harry shook his head, and directed a hard look at his fair-skinned hands. _I keep falling into that, because I_ feel _like Henry today, being out with somebody who isn't shouting at me or pushing me around or ignoring me, wearing clothes that don't feel like they were made to fit two of me. But I can't let myself forget, or I'll say something I shouldn't know, and I have a feeling that won't end well._

Just for one second, though, he allowed himself to daydream that he _was_ Henry Blake, not only in his dreams but for good and always, and that the person taking him to buy his school supplies was not a professor he'd just met but one of the people who'd raised him, who were his parents in all but blood.

 _Blood._ The word rang distant bells in Harry's mind. _All that stuff about purebloods, how they live and what they want, I've heard it before. Only it wasn't anything real, or at least not meant to be. It was in a story, I think…_

He smiled. _Of course, stupid me. How could I forget about the Townhouse books? Dad wrote them about the way he grew up, and I know he came from one of the stuck-up pureblood families, his parents threw him out of the house for dating Mom because she was Muggleborn! Not that it bothered him much, he was sick of them by then, so he just moved in with my birth dad's family until he was old enough legally to get a place of his own—_

"Harry." Professor McGonagall tapped him on the shoulder. "Our stop."

Shaking off the momentary dream, Harry got to his feet. A few flights of stairs later, they emerged onto a bustling road lined on both sides with shops. Professor McGonagall walked purposefully down the pavement, Harry keeping close to her shoulder, until she came to an abrupt halt between an enormous book shop and a record shop which was scarcely smaller. For an instant, Harry amused himself imagining the trouble he and his dad would have extracting Jeanie and Aunt Gigi and Pearl from the one place, Mal and Uncle John and his mom from the other…

 _Stop that._ He pinched the inside of his elbow sharply. _No more dreaming. This is real._

"Take a look around," the Professor invited him. "What do you see?"

"I see…" Harry glanced around. "Well, there's a little pub right there." He squinted at the grubby, faded sign hanging over the door. "The Leaky Cauldron? That's kind of a funny name. I'm surprised more people don't notice it." Considering this, he looked back at the Professor. "Or is there a reason they don't?"

Professor McGonagall only smirked faintly and motioned towards the door.

The interior of the Leaky Cauldron matched the exterior, being what Aunt Petunia would have scornfully called "shabby" and Aunt Gigi would have referred to as "lived-in". Harry got a quick impression of a few old women sitting in a corner with tiny glasses of sherry, a little man in a top hat talking to the toothless bartender, before Professor McGonagall's firm hand on his shoulder steered him swiftly through the bar and out into a small courtyard at the back where a rubbish bin stood against a brick wall. "Watch carefully, Harry," she said, taking out her wand again. "Start at the top of the bin, three up, then two across—"

"Was something the matter inside there?" Harry asked, looking over his shoulder at the pub behind him.

"I didn't think you would care to be fussed over." Professor McGonagall lowered her wand. "Was I wrong?"

"No." Harry shook his head hard. "No, you're right. I don't want that." He grimaced a little. "But I probably can't get away from it forever, can I? People are going to know, as soon as I say my name. Some of them even when they look at me."

"Some of them, yes." The Professor crossed her arms, looking thoughtful. "And you're quite right that you can't get away from it forever, but perhaps for today it could be avoided. Nothing says we have to give your name at the shops, after all." She tapped a finger against her lower lip. "We'll need to tell the goblins at Gringotts, but goblins don't tend to gossip with humans. And Mr. Ollivander, the wandmaker, ought to know for his records, but we can leave your wand until last. The only question is, if I should run into an acquaintance, and they ask who you are…"

"You could say I'm one of your new students," Harry suggested. "It's even true."

"It is." Professor McGonagall chuckled. "Though if they should ask for a name—"

"Henry." Harry shut his lips tight over the surname he'd been about to add. The Professor looked surprised enough at how quickly he'd come up with a response. "Sometimes," he said, choosing his words very carefully, "I have dreams. Dreams about being somebody who's a lot like me, but who's not quite me. He has a family, and friends, and he's happy. And his name is Henry." He tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry. "Is that wrong?"

"No, Harry," said Professor McGonagall, more gently than he had yet heard her speak. "Not in the least. I can't blame you for wanting that life, and giving it to your alter ego—your other self," she explained when Harry looked blank. "And I do wish, if it helps at all, that my presence here with you hadn't been necessary."

For one moment, she laid her hand on his shoulder. Then, briskly, she turned back to the wall and laid the tip of her wand against the brick she'd pointed out earlier, three up and two across from the top of the rubbish bin. "Watch closely," she said. "Henry."

Harry bit back an inappropriate snicker and observed. With three taps from Professor McGonagall's wand, the bricks of the wall politely rearranged themselves into a neat archway, beyond which he could see a winding cobblestone street, lined with shops which looked far more interesting than the ones on the road outside the Leaky Cauldron.

"Welcome," said Professor McGonagall, putting her wand away, "to Diagon Alley."

* * *

A couple of wild cart rides later, they stood outside the snowy marble edifice of Gringotts, Harry still rather awestruck by the weight of the bag of gold in his hand, and the small wad of paper bills in the pocket of his jeans. Professor McGonagall had had one of the goblins change a few Galleons into Muggle money for him, "just in case," she'd said with a smile.

"Where to first?" the Professor inquired now, unfolding the supply list from her pocket and holding it where Harry could see it. "We could stop at the Apothecary to get your potion supplies, or go to Flourish and Blotts for your schoolbooks—and yes, I saw you looking in that window at Quality Quidditch Supplies, but you know perfectly well you're not allowed your own broomstick this year," she added sternly. "Not that I wouldn't be tempted to bend the rules in your favor if you're anything like the flyer your father was, but we'll have to wait and see about that."

"What about my uniform?" Harry asked, looking at the top of the list. "Plain black work robes, hat, dragon hide gloves—"

"The gloves we'll get at the Apothecary, but for your robes and the rest, the best place would be Madam Malkin's." Professor McGonagall inclined her head towards the shop of this name, subtitled Robes for All Occasions. "You'll need something to go under your robes, as well, if all your clothes look like what you came out wearing this morning. They have a Muggle-Wear division in the back, so I'll handle that for you while you're being fitted, if you don't mind?"

Harry shook his head, and together they crossed the bustling thoroughfare and entered Madam Malkin's shop. Professor McGonagall nodded to the squat, smiling witch dressed in mauve and disappeared between racks of robes.

"Hogwarts, dear?" said Madam Malkin before Harry could speak. "Got the lot here. Another young man being fitted up just now, in fact. Come with me, we'll get you all set…"

In the back of the shop, near a three-sided mirror, a boy with a pale, pointed face and neatly combed white-blond hair was standing on a stool while another witch pinned the black robes he was wearing to the proper length. Madam Malkin indicated the next stool over to Harry, who climbed up and waited while another long black robe was thrown over his head.

"Hello," said the other boy, glancing over at Harry with a small smile. "Hogwarts, too?"

"Looks like it." Harry resisted the urge to frown. The other's face and voice seemed somehow familiar, but he was quite sure he had never seen this boy before in his life.

"My father's next door buying my books and Mother's up the street looking at wands." The boy cast his grey eyes up towards the ceiling. "Why, I don't know, since the wand chooses the wizard so I've got to be there in person, but I suppose she's making sure it's all up to her specifications. Nothing subpar for her baby boy."

Although this could easily have reminded him of Dudley, Harry found himself instead paradoxically warming to this stranger. The tone of voice had been somehow both sarcastic and loving, as though this boy were exasperated with his mother's fussing over him but had accepted that he was unlikely to change her.

"Do you know what House you'll be in yet?" the other went on, his fingers moving restlessly against the side of his robe in what looked like a definite pattern. "Most of my family's been in Slytherin, but just imagine. Common room under the lake, so everything's bound to be eternally damp, and enough backstabbing and social-climbing Housemates you'd never get a peaceful night's sleep…don't tell anybody, but I'm hoping for Hufflepuff, like my cousin." The corners of his eyes crinkled, as though he were repressing a smile. "Not that I'm going to be able to keep that quiet for long."

Harry stood very still as a sudden conviction rushed over him.

"And watch me forget my manners." The other boy held out his hand. "Draco Malfoy, and feel free to laugh, I usually do, though never in front of my mother. She's so proud of having found a name that combines both family traditions, I don't have the heart to tell her I hate it…" He stopped, regarding Harry uneasily. "I'm sorry, have I got dirt on my nose?"

"No, no." Harry laughed, a bit unsteadily, and accepted the offered hand. "It's just—" He swallowed against his nerves and took the plunge. "You look different."

"Beg your pardon?"

Harry coughed once, preparing to do something he'd only done a few times in the schoolyard for laughs, and never where Dudley could hear, since he had a feeling his relatives would have regarded it as more 'freakishness' on his part. "Do I remind you of anyone?" he said softly, in his best approximation of Henry's mid-Atlantic American accent.

"Remind me—" The grey eyes went very wide. "No. You're not."

Lifting his hand to his forehead, Harry swept his fringe momentarily aside, revealing his scar.

"Merlin's reeds." Draco Malfoy, which Henry Blake knew as the birth name of his cousin Mal, pressed his fingers to his temples. "You are. And you're also—" He blinked a few times and looked Harry up and down. "Did you just say _I_ look different?" he demanded.

"Oh, shut up." Harry glared at him. "Like it changes anything."

"I didn't say that." Draco held up his hands for peace. "But you have to admit…"

All at once, Harry saw the funny side of it, and had to press a hand across his mouth. Draco grinned, the sidelong expression Aunt Gigi called her son's Han Solo look. "I didn't know what to expect from today," he remarked, "but it wasn't this."

"You and me both," agreed Harry fervently, just as Madam Malkin said, "That's you done, my dear," from somewhere around his ankles.

"Meet me at Florian Fortescue's in ten?" Draco hissed as Harry stepped out of the now-pinned robe.

"I will." Hopping down off his stool, Harry hurried towards the front of the shop, his mind in a whirl.  


_I've wished all my life that my dreams could come true, but even with magic, I didn't think it was possible._

_But if some of the people in them are real…_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. There you have it, the seminal moment for this fic. I've always enjoyed that little encounter in Madam Malkin's, both in the canon book when I read it originally and later playing off it in my fan fiction, and now I've launched what looks like it could be another epic from that starting platform. I do hope you're enjoying it.
> 
> Next time: the boys have a talk. With ice cream. Because ice cream makes everything better. Thanks, as always, for reading, and I'll see you then!


	6. Friends New and Old

Harry, lost in thought about what had just happened, didn't realize until he was most of the way out of Madam Malkin's that he had no idea what 'Florian Fortescue's' might be. A step out the door and a look around him solved this problem, as he caught sight of an immense and gaudy sign for Florian Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlor. With that sorted, he was free to lean against the wall, shut his eyes, and indulge in a brief bout of the shakes as his nerves caught up with him.

 _I can't believe I did that. I can't believe I_ said _that. If he hadn't been—if I'd been wrong—_

But the fact remained that Harry hadn't been wrong, and his new knowledge thrilled and terrified him in equal measures, even more so than the arrival of his Hogwarts letter or Professor McGonagall's descent upon Privet Drive. Briefly he was reminded of the island in _The Voyage of the Dawn Treader_ from which the little Narnian ship had been warned to flee as quickly as possible, because dreams came to life there, good and bad dreams alike…

 _And there we have another useful tool for the writer to know. Irony._ Harry grinned to himself. _Comparing my fears about my dreams coming true to something I've only ever run across_ in _my dreams! Not likely Uncle Vernon or Aunt Petunia would let me read books stuffed with talking lions and walking trees and a hundred years of winter but never Christmas!_

But even a passing thought of Narnia brought up images in Harry's mind of adult faces seen from below while soft voices read words of wonder aloud. River and Firefly washed each other's faces on one side of him, and his baby sister leaned against him on the other, quivers running through her small frame as she battled to stay awake. Jeanie was nibbling on her thumbnail while she listened, Mal had both hands pressed against the carpet and was leaning forward, intent on the story—

"There you are," said Professor McGonagall, emerging from the shop in her turn. "I've arranged for your robes to be delivered to me, if that's quite all right with you." The spark of laughter he'd seen earlier in her eyes was dancing there once more. "Vernon Dursley is certainly one of the more oblivious Muggles I've ever run across, but I think even he would notice if you returned from what is supposed to be a day of ordinary testing for school with a trunk full of Hogwarts robes and spellbooks."

Harry entertained himself for a moment imagining Uncle Vernon's face should Harry indeed walk through the door at Privet Drive with this item in tow, but then shook his head. "It wouldn't be pretty," he said. "And if I'm supposed to stay with the Dursleys because it's the safest place for me…"

"Then we should do everything we can to continue the masquerade as long as possible." Professor McGonagall nodded. "Perhaps we should get all your school things sent to my attention, and simply have your trunk waiting for you at Hogwarts. Except for your wand, of course. You can easily keep that hidden for a month, and it's not advisable for a wand to be out of its owner's custody for too long, especially at the beginning of their relationship." She tapped a finger against her lips again. "Your books as well, I think. I can charm them to ensure their true nature won't be seen, and it seems in character for 'Miss McGrath' to send you home with a pile of extra studying to do before your first day of term."

"Dudley'll love that." Harry glanced past Professor McGonagall, letting his eyes widen with what he hoped was the right amount of surprise and interest. "He'd love that, too. If it is what it looks like." Casually, he nodded towards Florian Fortescue's. "Is it?"

"It is." Professor McGonagall regarded him coolly. "Are you trying to hint that you might like an ice cream, Henry?"

The form of address, coupled with what he'd just discovered in Madam Malkin's, roused Harry's sense of humor to full alertness. He tilted his chin to one side and looked up at the Professor soulfully, overacting just a touch as Henry's dad had taught him to do when pretending to wheedle out of his parents something they were likely to give him anyway.

The response he got was not what he'd expected. For the first time since he'd met her that morning, Professor McGonagall looked surprised, even stunned. "How did you—" she began in a harsh whisper, then shook her head sharply. "No. Ridiculous of me."

"Is something the matter, Professor?" Harry abandoned the pose immediately.

"You did nothing wrong." Professor McGonagall drew a deep breath and slowly let it out. "Only…a memory." Brushing a hand across her face, she smiled, the expression looking strained but becoming more natural after a moment. "I think an ice cream would be an excellent idea, for both of us."

As they drew closer to the ice cream parlor, Harry couldn't help but notice someone sitting at one of the outdoor tables, chatting animatedly with his companion. Even among the decidedly unusual crowd thronging Diagon Alley, this man stood out, both for his sheer size (half again as tall as anyone else, even sitting down, and twice to three times as wide) and for the wildness of his bushy, reddish-brown hair and beard. The young woman in maroon robes sitting across from him looked normal by comparison, until she laughed and blushed at something the huge man said, a tide of pink flowing across her cheeks, then surging upwards into her short-cropped hair.

Harry stopped short in the middle of the pavement, fighting off an incredulous grin.

Unless he was greatly mistaken, he wasn't the only person Draco was planning to meet at Florian Fortescue's.

"Professor McGonagall!" said the giant man in surprise, his voice carrying easily across the noise of the crowd. "Didn' know you were gonna be here today! And who's this, then?" he added as Harry slid between a plump witch in blue and a knot of darkly-glowering goblins to catch up with the Professor. "New student, eh? Muggleborn? Don' yeh worry 'bout me, I don' bite." He chuckled, the sound shaking the cobblestones under Harry's feet slightly, and held out an enormous hand to shake Harry's entire arm. "Rubeus Hagrid. Hogwarts groundskeeper, gamekeeper, what have yeh."

"If it needs keeping at Hogwarts, Hagrid keeps it," the pink-haired young woman put in, getting to her feet. "Well, I see who I came here to meet, so if you'll pardon me—oh, no? Stay?" She seemed to be translating something she was seeing, and Harry turned in time to catch a flash of pale hair threading through the sea of robes. "Apparently I'm not supposed to move. Not sure what that's about, he's usually a bit shy of being seen in public with me."

"He, Miss Tonks?" said Professor McGonagall pointedly.

Tonks (Harry breathed a silent sigh of relief that the surname had been supplied, as it would hardly have been wise for him to blurt out _Dora_ to her) flushed again, her hair darkening from its current bubblegum shade to something nearer the color of her robes. "My cousin, Professor. His parents wouldn't approve if they knew he was meeting me here."

Hagrid chuckled again, more darkly. "All th' more reason ter keep on doin' it, then."

"If I remember correctly, Miss Tonks," Professor McGonagall began, her brows drawing together in a manner which had Harry a trifle worried, "you have only one cousin whom you'd be likely to meet at Diagon Alley, and his name is—"

"Draco Malfoy, Professor." That young wizard stepped out of the crowd at Professor McGonagall's side with timing as perfect as Mal had ever demonstrated in distracting the Tudor Lane adults from a cousin about to get caught with his hand in the monk-shaped cookie jar. "Pleased to meet you."

Harry fought not to laugh as Professor McGonagall looked from Draco to Tonks and back again, her face carefully expressionless. "Likewise," she said at last. "I believe we'll be seeing you at Hogwarts in September, won't we?"

"I'm looking forward to it." Draco nodded towards his cousin. "Tonks has told me so much about what it's like, I feel like I've been there already." Looking past Professor McGonagall, he smiled more broadly. "You _must_ be Hagrid," he said, stepping between Professor McGonagall and Harry to offer his hand to the gamekeeper. "Nobody else could possibly—"

"Mal, you little prat!" Tonks broke in, her hair going fire-engine red. "You swore you'd never tell anyone I said that!"

"Oh, this I gotta hear." Hagrid leaned back in his chair, which creaked alarmingly but held. "Wha'd she tell yeh about me?"

Tonks moaned once and turned away, hiding her face in her hands.

"Mal?" interjected Professor McGonagall delicately.

"Well, she's Tonks." Draco indicated the witch of this name, who still had her back turned to the little group. "Why can't I be Mal? To some people, at least. I don't think Father would care for it much."

The rhythm and flow of this conversation gave Harry much the same feeling as sitting in a wooden kitchen chair at Tudor Lane, listening to the affectionate teasing which characterized most conversations there— _and why shouldn't it? We've got one of the people who lives there and one who's visited us quite a few times, she came over last month, even, and edged out Pearl as skee-ball champion when we went to the amusement park…_

"Speakin' o' names," Hagrid was saying now, looking over at Harry. "Don' think I caught yers." What could be seen of his forehead wrinkled thoughtfully. "Feel like I oughter know yer face, though."

Harry caught Professor McGonagall's eye and nodded, and she sighed. "Keep your voice down, Hagrid," she cautioned, drawing her wand and circling it about the area briefly. "But…may I introduce Harry Potter."

"Yer jokin'!" Hagrid laughed once, then looked again at Harry. "No. No, yer not either…"

With a shock, Harry saw tears well up in the black eyes. "I can' believe it," said Hagrid with a slight choke in his voice. Harry suspected the movement of Professor McGonagall's wand had been to cast the private-conversations spell once more, and was rather grateful for this. Hagrid was clearly making an effort to speak quietly, but his tones were still as carrying as another person's normal speaking voice. Draco had secured a hold on Tonks's sleeve and was murmuring to her, though both their eyes kept flicking back to Harry as well.

Hagrid gulped once and got himself under control. "Beg yer pardon. It jus'—it don' seem possible. Little Harry Potter—ah, sorry," he apologized again, though Harry hadn't been offended in the least. Even Uncle Vernon would have looked little next to Hagrid. "Yer all grown up now, aren' yeh, gettin' ready fer Hogwarts an' all? But the last time I saw yeh, you was just a baby." He crooked his left arm, as though holding a bundle in it. "Brought yeh to yer aunt an' uncle's, I did, and was I glad ter get yeh there safe an' sound!" Shaking his head, he exhaled a massive breath. "Dreamed fer weeks afterwards I'd flown all the way there an' found out too late I'd been carryin' a baby doll instead o' you!"

Professor McGonagall seemed intrigued by this detail, Harry noted with the one corner of his mind not fixed on a single word in the middle of Hagrid's last sentence. "Flown? On a broomstick, you mean?"

"Nah, not me." Hagrid gestured towards his massive self. "I'm a bit big fer brooms. Friend o' yer dad's lent me his motorbike ter get us safely there." His eyes narrowed momentarily in fury. "Though if I'd known 'bout him then what I know now…"

"You didn't, Hagrid," said Professor McGonagall firmly. "None of us did. And that's long since been dealt with. Harry, may I also introduce Nymphadora Tonks. Usually known by her surname only," she added at Tonks's grimace. "And her cousin—"

"We've met," said Harry, shaking Tonks's hand, then nodding to Draco. "In Madam Malkin's. We were getting fitted at the same time."

"It's nice to finally meet somebody who'll be in my year and isn't pureblood and proud of it." Draco drawled the last few words in a tone of utterly bored superiority before returning to his usual brisk tones. "Tonks told me they'd exist, but I wasn't sure I believed her."

Tonks reached over to ruffle her cousin's hair. "You think I'd lie to you?"

"You did once." Draco skillfully dodged out of the way. "You told me if I kept on calling Muggleborns Mudbloods, my tongue would turn brown and fall out."

"Got you to stop, didn't I?" retorted Tonks, both of them grinning. Hagrid was sniggering into his beard, and even Professor McGonagall looked amused.

"Your father knows nothing about this, I assume?" she asked Draco, who shook his head. "Or your mother?"

"Aunt Narcissa may," said Tonks before Draco could deny it. "No, she might," she insisted at her cousin's quizzical look. "Didn't you say once or twice when we'd wanted to meet over the holidays but it looked like you wouldn't be able to get away, she'd suddenly come up with some invitation for her and your father that meant they'd have to leave you at home with the house-elf? And Dobby's been on our side for years and years, ever since you sent me that first letter. He wouldn't give us away unless Uncle Lucius gave him a direct order to tell." She grinned. "I love calling him that in public. All his pureblood friends are always twitting him on it, but it's the truth, so there's nothing he can do!"

Professor McGonagall smiled at this, but her eyes were troubled. "Have a care," she warned. "Men like Lucius Malfoy are not always scrupulous in how they handle annoyances. But I'm sure you know that, and why waste a perfectly good summer day talking about it when we could be enjoying ourselves? I believe I promised ice creams…"

"I'd best be gettin' along," said Hagrid, heaving himself to his feet (he was even taller than Harry had anticipated, blocking out a good portion of the skyline). "Professor Dumbledore's expectin' me back with th' You-Know-What." Importantly, he patted one of the myriad pockets of his moleskin overcoat. "See you at Hogwarts, then, Harry, _Mal_." He winked broadly at Draco, who tossed him a two-fingered salute, and shook Harry's arm once more. "I'll invite yeh down fer a cuppa sometime, door's always open. Take care o' yerself, Tonks, see you back at th' castle, Professor…"

"Did you want a particular flavor, Harry?" Professor McGonagall asked as Hagrid strode away down the street, parting the crowd without effort.

Harry shook his head. "Anything's fine with me."

"And I know what this one likes," said Tonks, successfully disarranging Draco's hair this time. He growled at her, but made no effort to fix the disorder her fingers had left. "Besides, I've been going back and forth on writing to you for the last week, Professor. My mentor's got this variant on Vanishing he wants me to learn and I can't get the hang of it for the life of me…"

Tonks's voice became indistinct as the two witches passed through the border of the spell Professor McGonagall had cast, leaving Harry and Draco alone. Harry pulled up the chair Hagrid had been using and sat down, Draco doing the same with Tonks's.

"So," Draco said conversationally after several seconds of silence, finger-combing his hair back into place. "Where did River get his name?"

Harry sketched a Y-shaped formation on the tabletop. "River got _her_ name," he said, his emphasis on the pronoun making Draco grin, "from the markings on her back. Three black lines that run together like the three rivers. Only you can't call a cat Three Rivers, that's a sports stadium. So they just named her River. What about Firefly?"

"The tip of her tail's white where the rest of her's grey tabby." Draco mimed stroking all the way down a cat's back. "Aunt Thea said it looked like a firefly flashing every time she ran through the sunlight. Who caught the most when we chased them in the backyard last week, me or you?"

"Trick question." Harry glanced to one side, where a chair sat empty. "It wasn't either of us. It was Pearl—and I have _no_ idea where she came from," he added forcefully. "I don't _have_ a little sister!"

"No more do I have a big one, or any other kind." Draco motioned a straight vertical line. "I don't think there's been a two-child Malfoy family for more than a hundred years. Which I used to think was why I was always dreaming about a sister and a couple of cousins and what amounts to four parents, because I was lonely. Even bringing you in wasn't too much of a stretch, I've known your name forever. Though I admit the first thing I thought when I saw that scar in Madam Malkin's was 'thank Merlin, I haven't just babbled my head off to someone who's going to run and tell my father all about it the first chance he gets'. It took me a second to put everything together and realize _why_ all my usual filters had dropped off with you. And now…"

"Now, we know they're not just dreams." Harry flattened his hands against the table, imagining them darker than the wooden surface they touched. "Not when we're both having them." A thought flitted to the surface of his mind, and he looked up, meeting the grey eyes which belonged equally to Draco and to Mal. "What if we're not the only ones?"

For an instant, the grey lit up from within, like lightning inside storm clouds. "You mean—"

"You're real. I'm real." Harry glanced towards the way Professor McGonagall and Tonks had gone. "Even Dora's real, though I bet she'd hex me if I called her that."

"She might let you off, at least until you get your wand." Draco seemed to be having a hard time getting a full breath. "I hadn't thought this through all the way, but you're right. If the two of us exist in both worlds, there's really no reason—" He stopped. "Except that there is."

"What?" Harry asked.

"If it's not just you and I who're real on both sides. If it's everybody." Draco gestured in a broad circle, indicating the six members of the Tudor Lane household not currently present, along with the wider group of relatives and friends with whom they kept up relations. "I can understand why they might not make contact with me, but why haven't they at least come after you? I'd assume, if you're here with McGonagall, you're still living with your aunt and uncle and cousin, the rotten Muggle ones, what's their names…"

"The Dursleys, and you're right, I am. But that doesn't mean anything." Harry flicked away his years at Privet Drive impatiently. "Maybe they think the dreams are just dreams and I'm happy there, or maybe their real lives are too crazy to have a kid tagging along, or maybe there's some other reason they can't come. Or—no, I know what it is. What it must be." He let his fingers rest against the pulse point on his other wrist. "Professor McGonagall told me, there's magic over the Dursleys' house, magic that only works because we're blood relations, and it's kept me safe all these years."

"That is a point." Draco nodded thoughtfully. "Your parents, your birth parents, they died trying to protect you, and that's blood magic from a willing sacrifice, the strongest kind there is. I know I've heard Father swearing at those wards dozens of times because he can't break through them, wishing he'd tried to get hold of you before Hagrid got you there…" His one-sided smile reappeared, twisted a little further than usual. "And here we see another reason why I might dream up a different family for myself. Though there's one thing I've never understood. If _my_ surname were Blake, that wouldn't be too strange—it's pretty close to Black, which is my mother's maiden name, that's the side Tonks and I are related on—but _Reynolds?_ "

"I'm pretty sure that's not the name they started out with." Harry cast his mind into Henry's past, seeking the hazy, dream-distant stories of the way their family had begun. "It almost can't be, because we're in hiding at Tudor Lane, aren't we? Because of me? 'Blake' might not be anybody's real name either…"

Draco hissed in warning, and Harry glanced over to see Professor McGonagall and Tonks returning, each of them carrying two ice creams. "So," he said, sitting back in his chair. "Tell me about Quidditch."

"Only one of the best games in the world." Draco wove his hands through the air like flyers chasing one another. "Seven players to a side, all on broomsticks, of course, and there's three different kinds of balls. Chasers play with the Quaffle, it's about so big and red, and the only magic on it keeps it from falling too fast if they drop it, to give them a chance to get it back without ploughing themselves every time in the process…"

The rest of the conversation, held in between licks and bites (Harry's ice cream turned out to be chocolate and raspberry with chopped nuts, while Draco's was mint chocolate chip with strawberries), revolved around generalities of the wizarding world, Tonks and Draco expanding upon the things Professor McGonagall had begun to explain on the train that morning, until between one sentence and the next Tonks snapped "Ware!" and Draco vanished under the table with the speed of River or Firefly spotting the dog next door.

"What—" Harry began, then followed Tonks's line of sight. Striding up Diagon Alley, glaring from side to side, came a tall adult wizard with long, straight, pale-blond hair and perfectly pressed black robes, a polished black cane gripped in his hand, a hissing silver serpent as its head. His pale, pointed features and the hard look in his grey eyes would have given Harry his identity even if Tonks's equally stony glare and Draco's disappearing act hadn't already done the same.

Lucius Malfoy swept his gaze slowly across the outdoor seating at Florian Fortescue's. Finding nothing there to interest him, he nodded coldly to Professor McGonagall and moved on.

Harry released the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. From under the table came a muttered curse, and Draco reappeared where he had been, slightly disheveled and glowering after his father. "Made me drop my ice cream," he grumbled. "One more month, that's all, just one more month, and then I'm shot of him for ten months a year for the next seven…" Straightening his hair, he glanced across at Harry. "Same deal for you, right? No more crazy relatives except over the summers?"

"How're you going to explain your going away, though?" asked Tonks, frowning. "If they expect you to be staying with them, going to school locally?"

"I have a few ideas on that point." Professor McGonagall took a last bite of her ice cream (mixed berry with butter cookie pieces) and got to her feet. "But we should be going now, and so should you, young man," she added to Draco. "If your father is looking for you in that much of a temper, I wouldn't think you'd care to delay."

"Easy enough to fix." Draco shrugged. "I'll head for Quality Quidditch Supplies and claim I've been there the whole time, checking out the new Nimbus, the 2000." His one-sided grin reappeared. "Not that I would ever dream of smuggling an illegal broomstick into Hogwarts, of course."

"Of course." Professor McGonagall returned the look blandly. "Not that I would ever dream of warning Severus Snape to search your belongings for one."

Draco paused at the edge of the outdoor seating. "Who said I wanted to be a Slytherin?" he inquired, and vanished into the crowd before the Professor could reply.

Tonks winked at Harry. "Suppose I'll be pushing off too, then," she said, getting up. "Loads of homework to do, even if that's not what they call it anymore. Good to meet you, Harry, don't hesitate to owl if you need anything—like Hagrid said, door's always open, especially for a friend of my Mal's."

"Your Mal." Professor McGonagall regarded her former student in something like wonder. "And his parents have _no_ idea?"

"Like I said, Aunt Narcissa might, but if Uncle Lucius did, don't you think he'd have cut us off a long time ago?" Tonks grinned. "But he didn't, so he doesn't. And he won't, until he gets the letter from Hogwarts." A brush of her hands stippled her hair with black and yellow. "You might want to think about warning Professor Sprout to be on the lookout for that broomstick instead."

"I will." Professor McGonagall watched Tonks walk away, then looked down at Harry. "An eventful first day in the wizarding world for you," she said. "And we still have more than half your supplies to get, and then the journey back." Her smile was definitely predatory, and Harry was reminded again of the tabby cat he'd watched on the days before his birthday, or of Firefly or River stalking a bug which had happened into the house. "As I said, I have a few ideas about how best to handle your relations."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I would say this story's got a pretty firm hold on me. Let me know if you're also enjoying. More as soon as I'm able, which judging by the past should be quite soon indeed...


	7. Past and Future

"I heard an intriguing bit of gossip regarding you while I was investigating your situation at Privet Drive," said Professor McGonagall to Harry as they browsed through the shelves at Flourish and Blotts (with the knowledge that disguising charms were possible on books, Harry had decided to make his birthday present to himself a selection from the 'Muggle Views on Magic' section of the shop). "Something about your being a pathological liar, perpetually destructive, and possibly violent as well?"

"That's what the Dursleys tell everyone." Harry regarded the enormous single-volume Chronicles of Narnia and the boxed set of seven separate books beside it, trying to decide which one he wanted. "The violent bit is to explain why Dudley's always chasing me. He's trying to keep me from hurting anyone. And they tried giving me decent clothes, but I'd just tear them up and lie about how it happened, so that's why I only get what Dudley's done with anymore." Selecting the boxed set, he tucked it under his arm and moved over from L to N, smiling as he spotted the sequel to _Five Children and It_ along with another series by the same author.

"And people believe this?" Professor McGonagall sounded deeply skeptical, and if Harry wasn't mistaken, angry as well. It reinforced his sensation of being Henry Blake for the day instead of Harry Potter, to have an adult nearby who was angry _for_ him, instead of being angry _with_ him.

"Most of them do," he answered belatedly, scooping up a misshelved copy of _The Hobbit_ and adding it to the stack, watching as the dwarves marched across the cover with Bilbo scurrying along behind them. He'd already discovered the photographs in his schoolbooks could move, and it seemed magical drawings occasionally displayed the same talents. "A couple people haven't, like Miss Gray, one of my teachers at school. She made me a thing I wrote about having in a story assignment, and gave me some good advice later on."

"But by and large, your aunt and uncle's neighbors would be unsurprised if you were named on the evening news as having murdered thirteen people simply because you could." Professor McGonagall sniffed. "Every so often, I find myself more in sympathy with some of my colleagues' views on Muggles than I'd like. But that's neither here nor there." She tapped her wand against Harry's stack of books, and they lifted out of his arms to float tidily beside him. "It does, however, lend itself to what I'd been thinking about telling your relatives. Let's pay for these and your schoolbooks, and arrange to have them held here until the end of the day, and then we'll discuss it further on the way to the Apothecary…"

* * *

Professor McGonagall's plan, Harry thought as he listened to her outline it, had distinct similarities with the prank training he'd received in his dream life ever since he could recall. He was beginning to see why his mom, dad, and uncle mentioned her name with mingled affection and awe.

_Aunt Gigi would too, I bet, except she never went to Hogwarts. I don't think she even knew about magic until she was nineteen or twenty…_

The bell over the door of the Apothecary jingled as Professor McGonagall pulled it open, and Harry pinched himself once more as he stepped inside from the warm, sunny July day to the cool interior of the shop with its faint scent of rotten eggs. For the first time in his life, reality was offering him something just as interesting as dreams, and he didn't want to miss a minute of it.

"Browse as you like," said Professor McGonagall, waving her hand at the shop's dusky depths. "But do remember that locked bins are generally locked for a reason."

"Yes, Professor." Harry began to wander along one of the aisles delineated by rickety-looking shelves, wondering what kinds of potions called for preserved caterpillars or cockroaches, and hoping he wouldn't be expected to drink them. He was used to spiders and other creepy-crawlies, but preferred them to remain outside his body.

 _And why would anybody need a stone taken from the stomach of a goat? Funny name, though._ Carefully, he committed the word to memory, tracing it with his fingertip to engrave it on his mind. _Be-zo-ar, bezoar. Got it._

Arriving at the back of the shop, he found himself facing an enormous wall lined with drawers, all of which were labeled in faint, graying handwriting. Some of the labels made him smile, as things like blackberry leaves, marigold petals, and rosemary roots brought to mind his mother's garden and the small potion-brewing nook she maintained in the basement at Tudor Lane, just outside the laundry room. Others, such as wormwood, asphodel, and monkshood (under which was written 'aconite' and 'wolfsbane', the last of these getting a brief snicker out of Harry) were less familiar to him, but the skull and crossbones drawn next to each suggested a possible reason for this.

_Mom wouldn't grow poisons in the same garden she uses for vegetables and ordinary ingredients, not when we're all in and out of there every day, weeding or chasing cats or picking stuff for Aunt Gigi to cook with. She does have a few poisonous plants, but she's got them set up with grow-lights in the storage room, on the top of one of the shelves at the back, and warded all around so there's no chance we'll get into them even by accident…_

Another label caught his eye, and he pulled open a drawer near the left side of the wall. A soft, minty, familiar fragrance rose to meet him, and to Harry's surprise, he suddenly had to swallow against tears.

 _Finding out my dad and mum weren't freaks and neither am I, getting ready to go away from the Dursleys to attend wizard school, looking forward to learning real magic and making real friends—it's amazing, the best birthday present I've ever had, and it ought to be enough. And maybe, if I'd never had the dreams, if I'd never been Henry Blake, it would have been enough._ He took a pinch of the dried leaves which filled the drawer and crumbled them between his fingers, releasing more of their sweet, tangy scent. _But I have and I have been, and that changes everything. Even meeting up with Mal and Dora, or Draco and Tonks I suppose I should call them if I don't want to get my worlds mixed, doesn't really feel like enough, because—_

His traitorous mind supplied his cousin's eyes in a stranger's pointed face, his cousin's voice speaking in oddly cultured tones.

" _If it's not just you and I who're real on both sides…if it's everybody…why haven't they at least come after you?"_

"There's a reason." Harry didn't realize until he heard the words sounding hoarsely in his ears that he'd spoken aloud. "There's got to be a reason, and it isn't because they don't care about me. I won't believe that, not unless I have to." Looking around, he spied a small stack of cloth bags and helped himself to one, picking up the scoop which hung from a silver chain and measuring out an ounce of the leaves which had begun this chain of thought. "Not unless there's proof. _Real_ proof, not just 'everybody says'." The injudicious use of this phrase had sparked one of the only moments of true anger Henry had ever seen his easy-going dad display. "Besides." He tapped a finger against the drawer which bore three names. "I know one of them already."

The "furry little problem" belonging to Henry's Uncle John had never been kept a secret from the children resident at 2319 Tudor Lane, but it had been carefully impressed on them that the rest of the world would not be so understanding. As far as anyone outside their household was aware, Mal and Jeanie's father suffered from chronic headaches, which could be controlled most of the time with medication and pain management techniques, but which flared up badly for a day or two every month, keeping him housebound for that period and leaving him looking drawn and worn afterwards.

 _And during his worst times, he can't deal with any sound at all, not even whispering or tiptoeing. Which is why, whenever his headaches get that bad, Aunt Gigi takes us to stay with my mom's aunt Amy in her apartment downtown for a day or two, so he can sleep it off._ Harry grinned, pulling tight the drawstring closure of the cloth bag. _Or that's what we tell everyone, anyway. He's really spending the night down in the Doghouse with Dad, with Mom standing by in case someone has to use magic to keep things contained, but she's never been needed, not once in all the time we've lived there…_

Still, Harry had a strong suspicion that John Reynolds, or whatever his name was in Harry's waking world, would have been disqualified from Harry's guardianship almost automatically, simply by virtue of being what he was.

_And never mind that I'd a million times rather live with a werewolf than with the Dursleys!_

Shoving these thoughts aside (since he wouldn't have to live with either of them after another month, at least not until the end of the following June), Harry started for the front of the shop, arriving just in time to add his bag of leaves to the counterful of bottles, vials, and jars Professor McGonagall and the wizard behind the counter had collected between them. The wizard opened the bag, took a quick sniff, and nodded. "One ounce catnip," he said, punching buttons on his antique cash. "Which brings your total to…"

Professor McGonagall raised an eyebrow at Harry as he dug the required Galleons, Sickles, and Knuts out of his moneybag, but refrained from comment until they had left the shop, the catnip in Harry's pocket and the rest of the ingredients packed up to be owled to Hogwarts that night. "Are you thinking of a cat to bring to Hogwarts?" she asked as they walked along the pavement. "Certainly a very traditional animal, though keeping it hidden for the next month might be a problem."

"What—oh, no." Harry shook his head. "I like cats, but I don't think I want one just yet. Though I do know somebody who might take care of one for me, if I asked nicely," he added with a small grin, thinking of Mrs. Figg and her perpetually furry house. "Or if I got a grown cat, not a kitten, it might be able to take care of itself. There was one I kept seeing over the past few days, a tabby with markings around its eyes, markings kind of like—"

He broke off with a gasp. Professor McGonagall had vanished, and standing in her place was the spectacle-marked cat. It looked up at Harry and nodded, then shot upwards into the shape of the Professor once more. "You're quite observant," she remarked, straightening her robes. "Generally people look past me in that form."

"I was trying to keep my mind off things." Harry looked from the Professor's face to the place where the cat had been and back again. "Was that—are you—"

"I'm what's known as an Animagus, as compared to Miss Tonks, who is a Metamorphmagus. Mine is a learned skill, while hers was inborn, but both are quite rare. I don't think there's been more than a handful of Animagi this century. And yes, conceivably, you could learn how," said the Professor before Harry could ask the question now burning in his mind. "Not tomorrow, or next week, or next year—the process encompasses several different fields of magic, and takes a great deal of dedication and hard work to complete successfully—but you could learn. Now." She brushed her hands against her sides, as though to dismiss this topic. "Why _did_ you buy catnip, if you aren't thinking of getting a cat?"

"I liked the way it smelled," Harry began, then stifled a grin as a way to tell only the convenient portion of the truth came to mind. "And my uncle was in a good mood this one day, and he showed me how you could brew tea with herbs. So I thought I'd try it."

Professor McGonagall raised an eyebrow again (the other one this time) but let this pass. "Very well. Where next? Cauldrons, or telescopes?"

* * *

A few hours later, Harry took another bite of his hamburger, which he was holding with his left hand only. His right hand was resting across his pocket, from which protruded the grip of a holly and phoenix feather wand, eleven inches long, nice and supple. Beside him on a plastic chair sat two piles of books, all carefully charmed to show titles like _Applied Geometric Theory_ , _Introduction to Organic Chemistry_ , and _Philosophy: A Comparative Study_. Professor McGonagall had bought them both some dinner when they'd arrived at Paddington station, then excused herself for a moment. Harry didn't mind. He had a lot to think about.

 _Mal, my cousin Mal. He's real. So's his cousin Dora. And_ she's _grown-up, so she can legally do magic. Lucky._

One of the first things Professor McGonagall had told him after they'd left Ollivanders was that unsupervised magic by underage witches and wizards was strictly forbidden, and could get him into a lot of trouble, with official warnings from the Ministry of Magic or even expulsion from Hogwarts for repeat offenses. Harry could see the sense in this, but still couldn't help but be disappointed. He'd been looking forward to cursing Dudley.

 _But why do I need to think about him? He's not worth it. And this is._ Harry glanced down at his wand again and brushed his fingers across it, smiling at the wash of warmth through his hand. He hadn't quite understood what was meant by "the wand chooses the wizard" until the moment in Ollivanders when he'd taken hold of this wand.

_It felt like finding a missing piece of me. Like something stopped aching that I hadn't even realized was hurt. Or like…_

"Like recognizing him." Harry slid his fingers down to the bag of catnip nestling against the wand in his pocket. "Like watching him recognize me. We're going to find the others. We are. And then we'll have our family here just like we do there."

 _Except for one problem._ He bit into what was left of the hamburger. _Draco's already got a family, and they were on the other side of the war from mine._

_Still, nothing says he can't have us as friends._

_Unless his father does._

Harry shivered a little. He hadn't liked the look of Lucius Malfoy at all, and hadn't needed Professor McGonagall's quiet warning in the next shop they'd visited that the older wizard was not to be trusted. His own situation and Draco's, he thought, had more in common than they might outwardly appear.

_But in another month, none of that will matter any longer._

_In another month, we'll be going to Hogwarts, and all of that will be in the past…_

"Finally," said Professor McGonagall, slipping into the seat across from Harry. "I thought I'd never find what I was looking for. I hope you haven't been worried, or bored?"

"No, Professor," said Harry, making sure to swallow first. The see-food diet generally got his head swatted at Tudor Lane. "I was thinking about…" At a loss for words, he circled a hand. "Everything."

"It is quite a lot of everything to think about, isn't it?" The Professor smiled, unwrapping her own hamburger. "It struck me, Harry, that there was one thing you hadn't previously had that I could provide you. And it being your birthday, a gift seemed appropriate. Many happy returns of the day, by the by." From under the table, she produced a small wrapped package and passed it across to him. "I hope you enjoy it."

Tucking the last bite of hamburger into his mouth, Harry wiped his fingers carefully on a napkin and hefted the present in one hand. It was compact, not terribly heavy, and felt as though it might open…

_And if I just unwrap it, I could find out!_

Action followed word, and moments later there was a small pile of shredded paper on Harry's tray, while Harry himself frowned at the rectangular piece of wood he was holding—or no, he discovered upon further examination, it was three pieces, hinged together to fold up like a letter, but when unfolded—

His heart surged up into his mouth as he saw what Professor McGonagall had given him.

From the left side of the trifold picture frame waved a man, his eyes behind round-framed glasses a clear and laughing hazel, his hair as black and as uncontrollably messy as Harry's own. From the right smiled a woman with a cascade of red hair flowing across her shoulders, her face reminiscent of his Aunt Petunia's but slender rather than bony, her eyes identical to the ones now gazing at her.

"You said you had never seen their pictures," said Professor McGonagall softly into the silence. "It seemed to be the least I could do."

Not trusting his voice, Harry only nodded, and turned his attention to the center of the frame. His father, in what looked to be formal black dress robes, and his mother, in a gown of flowing white, were standing together beneath an arch of flowers, waving to the crowd around them, stopping every so often to kiss. Behind them, he could see flashes of movement associated with other sets of dress robes—someone, he thought, had thrown his head back to laugh, while someone else was shaking his own head ruefully—

A flash of red on his mother's side of the photograph drew his attention away from the groom's party, and his mouth went completely dry.

 _That's Mom. That's my_ mom _. Standing next to—my mum, I guess, though that sounds_ so _strange—_

"Is something wrong, Harry?" asked Professor McGonagall, looking at him in concern.

"No." Harry knew he wouldn't be believed, not when the word had come out as half a sob, but hoped its cause would be misunderstood. "I—I just—thank you, Professor."

"You're quite welcome. Pardon me a moment." The Professor bent down to disentangle the heel of her boot from the hem of her skirt, allowing Harry time to blot his eyes on a spare napkin and get his thoughts together.

"I wonder if you can tell me, Professor," he said when she had straightened up again. "Who's this?" He indicated the red-robed witch standing beside Lily Potter, handing her a bouquet of flowers and making throwing motions in the air. "Was she a friend of my mum's?"

"She was, and quite a good one, given that she traveled all the way from…" Professor McGonagall cut herself off, shaking her head ruefully. "Except that she didn't," she said. "How strange, to find myself believing the stories we told back then."

An announcement echoed through the air, and the Professor got to her feet. "Our train," she said. "I can continue the story once we're on board, if you like."

"Yes, please, Professor." Harry folded the picture frame up again and set it on top of one of his piles of books. "But what was her _name_? If you don't mind," he added hastily.

"Her name was, and is, Aletha Freeman." Professor McGonagall smiled at the interest Harry couldn't quite mask. "Yes, she survived the war. But I'm afraid you're unlikely to meet her any time soon, Harry. She lives in America, and has for a number of years."

 _That won't stop me._ Harry hefted his pile of books, allowing himself a momentary grin since the Professor's back was turned. _Or rather, it won't stop Henry. And he doesn't have to go very far, either. Just a step out of his bedroom door and turn left, and there she'll be…_

* * *

"So, Aletha Freeman," Professor McGonagall began when the train was underway and the private-conversations spell had been cast once more. "She was at Hogwarts about the same time as your parents, a year behind them, if I remember correctly. She and your mother struck up a friendship on account of a mutual talent for potion brewing, and she and one of your father's friends were very reluctant Beating partners for Gryffindor—you remember what Beaters do, I'm sure."

"Hit the black balls, the Bludgers, that try to knock players off their brooms." Harry mimed swinging a bat. "She must have been very strong, then."

"She was, and a highly gifted witch as well." Professor McGonagall chuckled. "Which irked the pureblood students no end, because not only was Aletha Freeman Muggleborn, but her father had the abysmal taste to be American. But in any case, she finished her schooling, sat her examinations, and then announced her intention of leaving the country immediately, to seek Healer training in her father's native land. She saw, she said, no reason to stay and lose her life for something she couldn't help when she could be learning how to save the lives of others if she left."

"But she didn't actually go?" Harry unfolded the picture frame again, seeking two female faces close together, one so fair, the other so dark. "What did she do instead?"

"She went into hiding, so to speak, in a semidetached house in a Muggle suburb of London. An assumed name, a bit of disguise, though her best disguise was simply becoming too ordinary to notice, and that she knew how to do. And from that very ordinary semidetached, she pursued her Healing studies privately, while also running one of the only safe houses on our side of the war which was never discovered by the followers of You-Know-Who, the Death Eaters, as they styled themselves." The Professor's eyes grew momentarily distant again. "But then the war ended," she murmured, more to herself than to Harry. "And Aletha had to contend with heartbreak on top of heartbreak."

"Did someone she loved die?" asked Harry, uncertain if he wanted to know the answer but positive he needed to ask. Something told him he was approaching one of the core reasons why he had grown up at number four, Privet Drive, instead of 2319 Tudor Lane.

"No." The Professor's voice was iron. "It would have been better if he had. But no, Harry, the man Aletha Freeman loved did not die in the war. He betrayed her instead, betrayed her and your parents and all of us. He became a Death Eater, a spy for You-Know-Who inside our forces. And in his madness after his master disappeared, he killed thirteen people with a single curse, including a man he had once considered a friend." She sighed deeply. "He was sent to Azkaban for his crimes, and Aletha chose to make the story we had circulated the truth. She left the country to join her aunt, her father's sister, in America. I never saw her again."

Harry opened his mouth to ask one of the million questions buzzing in his brain, then closed it again. Professor McGonagall, he was sure, was telling him the exact truth as she knew it.

_But that doesn't mean she's right. Not about everything. Not about everyone._

_Sometimes things happen that people don't find out about until too late._

"Does she have any kids?" he asked instead.

"Aletha?" The Professor frowned, looking down at the photograph Harry still held on his lap. "I suppose it's possible. She was a young woman still when she left us, and very beautiful, as you can see. She may even be married by now. Though I do hope she didn't abandon her training, good Healers are hardly a Sickle a score." She pressed her knuckles momentarily to her lips, then sighed again. "Ah well. All in the past, and there's still a future to contend with. Two versions of it, even." Her eyes, so sad a few moments before, were now alive with the enjoyment of the joke she and Harry would shortly be playing on the Dursleys. "There's what will truly happen, and then there's what your relatives will _think_ is going to happen…"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And I was going to write that here, but I think I'll leave it to start off the next chapter. It'll be more fun there, when I'm fresh. Thanks again for reading, and I shall see you next time!
> 
> A reminder that my blog, [Anne's Randomness](http://www.annebwalsh.com/blog.html), is housed at my website, [annebwalsh.com](http://www.annebwalsh.com/default.html), and that today was Fiction Friday, when I post an original bit of fiction for your reading pleasure! Today's Fiction Friday piece was the start of a longer story instead of an individual flash fiction, a retelling of a Hans Christian Andersen tale entitled "The Most Incredible Thing"—if you have a few moments, why not check it out?


	8. The Best-Laid Plans

Petunia Dursley hummed to herself as she cleared the table from dinner. The day had been entirely calm and pleasant, with her Dudders in and out of the house with his friends, her own enjoyable chats on the telephone, Vernon coming home satisfied with the number of people he'd shouted at during the day. She could almost believe, for these few precious moments, that the even tenor of the life she had chosen for herself had never been shaken, that her sister had never died, that no unwelcome bundle had ever been left on her doorstep with a letter she'd read through carefully, then just as carefully burned, to make sure no trace of that knowledge could ever reach her nephew…

The doorbell rang, and she stifled a groan. This was surely Harry, back from his day of school testing.

_And what they'll have made of his unnatural tendencies, I have no idea. I wish he'd inherited some of his father's wildness, or a bit of Lily's temper—perhaps then we could be rid of him altogether!_

Shoving this away as an idle dream, she went to answer the door.

Two people were revealed on its other side, both her nephew with a tall stack of books in his arms and the forbidding-looking woman who had called for him that morning. "Good evening, Mrs. Dursley," said the latter, Miss McGrath, if Petunia recalled correctly. "Do you and your husband have a few minutes? Some results have come up from Harry's testing I think we ought to discuss. You can take those to your bedroom," she added to Harry. "Mind what I told you, now, a chapter a day from each of them, and no shirking."

"Ah," said Petunia weakly as Harry looked at her sidelong, both a question and a trace of unholy amusement in the eyes so like her sister's. "Yes. Why don't I help him with that, you can come right in, Miss McGrath, the living room is just through here—Dudley darling," she called, hoping her rising hysteria could not be heard in her voice. "Why don't you come upstairs with me, just for a moment? My husband, Miss McGrath, Vernon Dursley…"

"How d'you do," said Vernon, offering his hand as Dudley squeezed by, looking in astonishment at the huge stack of books Harry was holding. "Right this way. Would you care for anything to drink?"

"Thank you, but no," said Miss McGrath, her voice fading as Petunia herded both boys upstairs, catching a few books as they threatened to fall from the top of Harry's stack.

"What did you tell her?" she hissed at Harry in the upstairs hallway.

"Nothing." Harry shook his head hard. "I didn't tell her anything, I promise."

"All right." Slightly mollified, Petunia opened the door to Dudley's second bedroom and gestured Harry inside. "In here, then, and mind you don't break any of Dudley's things." She glanced down at the books she still held in her hands, automatically checking to be sure they weren't anything that would give the boy ideas, then thrust them at Harry. "Stay here, stay quiet, and don't you dare let me catch you sneaking downstairs to eavesdrop."

"No, Aunt Petunia," said Harry obediently, but Petunia caught the faintest quirk of his lips as he turned away to look out the window. She would have pursued this further, but Dudley, behind her, was beginning to snivel in outrage. Swiftly she shut the door and steered her son into his own bedroom, petting and soothing him as had become second nature.

"I know it's not fair, Duddy-dinkums," she told him as he glowered towards the closed door, "but it's only for tonight. He'll be out of there again as soon as Miss McGrath leaves, and there's not much he could hurt, now is there? Play something on your computer, darling, but keep the sound low, Mummy has to go downstairs and talk…"

With Dudley safely distracted at the prospect of blowing up squadrons of aliens, Petunia hurried back down the stairs, hearing the familiar sound of Vernon laughing at one of his own jokes. "Here I am," she said, crossing into the living room. "Terribly sorry to have taken so long, but you know how it is with boys that age, I'm sure, Miss McGrath."

"Indeed." Miss McGrath sat very upright in one of the armchairs, looking from Petunia to Vernon and back again, and Petunia had the uncomfortable sensation that she was back at school, about to take an examination for which she hadn't sufficiently studied.

"What can either of you tell me about Harry's parents?" the older woman asked after a moment. "His father, in particular. Was there any tendency towards violence in the family background, or any reason to believe his emotional development might be subpar?"

"Why—why, yes," said Petunia quickly, nudging Vernon with her elbow. "I begged my sister not to marry him, to wait for someone a bit steadier, less wild, but she never would listen to a word I said, it was James Potter or nobody for her."

"Unemployed little vagrant that he was," Vernon joined the conversation, as Petunia breathed a sigh of relief that she'd married a man so quick on the uptake. "How he expected to support a family is more than I'll ever know. I've always suspected he killed himself and Lily in a fit of despondency, turned on the gas and blew up his house after realizing he couldn't pay his bills." He shook his head heavily. "Not to ill-wish anyone, but it might've been better if the boy had gone with his parents…"

"Is something the matter with Harry?" Petunia put in quickly, seeing Miss McGrath's eyes narrowing. "Something we ought to know about? We've always been worried, done what we can to keep anything from going wrong, but we're only human, after all."

"Indeed," said Miss McGrath again. "And I'm sure any violent tendencies in Harry couldn't possibly be blamed on you. What's bred in the bone, after all. However, I will confess to a certain uneasiness with the idea of sending him to an ordinary school. I've given him some books on more advanced subjects than he would usually be studying—with cases like this, sometimes all that's needed is to keep the mind occupied—but if there's any sort of incident before the end of the summer, please contact my office immediately. It may be necessary for him to be sent…somewhere else. At no cost to you, of course," she added before Vernon could open his mouth. "It's part of a new initiative, to make sure our children are safe while they learn."

* * *

Upstairs, in what had been Dudley's second bedroom, Harry lay with his ear to the heat register, his face buried in a pillow from the bed to muffle his laughter. This plan had sounded like fun while it was being thrashed out on the train, but it was twice and three times as much fun as he'd expected to hear it playing out beneath him.

 _Now I just need to decide what kind of "incident" I'm going to create. Dropping one of my textbooks out the window while Dudley's walking past might do it. Maybe the Potions book, it's the biggest—or no, what did Professor McGonagall charm it to say?_ He unearthed his face long enough to glance at the bed, where his textbooks stood neatly stacked in a pile. _Organic chemistry, that's right. So Dudley gets a nice dose of organic chemistry to the head, and I get to go away to Hogwarts without the Dursleys knowing anything about it…_

The pillow became necessary once more.

* * *

"This number should always find me, or another member of our staff," said Miss McGrath, handing over a business card. "Don't hesitate to call, anytime, day or night. Your safety, and that of your son, is of course our foremost concern. May I see where Harry's window falls on the outside of the house, please?"

"Of course," Petunia began, getting to her feet, "but why—"

"You'd be astounded what technology can do these days." Miss McGrath smiled, her lips very thin. "If he's getting up to anything in that bedroom he oughtn't, we'll be able to see it, and stop it before it starts. If you would?"

"Vernon, would you mind?" said Petunia faintly as the full implications of this burst over her.

_I'm going to have to explain to Dudley why he can't have his second bedroom back…_

_But it's only for a month,_ she comforted herself. _Only for a month, and then everything will be the way I wanted it. The way I thought it never could be. The way I wished for._

Sometimes, it seemed, wishes really did come true.

Holding tightly to that bit of knowledge, Petunia started up the stairs.

Her darling Duddykins wasn't going to like this at all.

* * *

Turning back from shaking Miss McGrath's hand and wishing her a good night, Vernon blinked. For one second, he thought he'd seen wings fluttering at the window he supposed he'd now have to think of as Harry's.

_Nonsense. I'm overtired, imagining things. Or possibly it's just a reaction from learning there might actually be a chance to get rid of the boy. "If there's any sort of incident during the summer"—oh, there will be. Mark my words, there will be. And then he'll be gone, gone for the better part of a year, and not likely to be much trouble when he comes back, either…_

Vernon smiled, envisioning what Harry's life would be at a school of the sort Miss McGrath had hinted about.

_Best thing that could happen to him, really._

_Best thing that could happen to all of us._

Humming under his breath, he went inside. The occasion seemed to call for a drink.

* * *

Ignoring Dudley's hiccuping howls from across the hall, Harry accepted a letter and a small parcel from the heart-faced barn owl who had arrived at his window a few moments before. "Thanks," he told it. "You'd better stay here a little while, until everyone goes to bed. If my aunt and uncle see you, they won't like it at all."

The owl clacked its beak quietly and pushed off Harry's wrist, fluttering over to perch on the bottom of the bed frame, where it began to preen a wing. Harry turned his attention to the items it had brought him, tearing open the letter, which was addressed to him in a broad, not-quite-scrawling handwriting.

 _Dear Harry_ (the letter began),

_Struck me after I got home that you might not have an owl of your own, since I doubt your relations feel any too friendly towards magic if Professor McGonagall was taking you around Diagon Alley. So I figured I'd send Merope here to see if you had any letters you want her to take for you. Also thought I should warn you not to write to Mal directly, though you'd probably gathered that already. I get my letters in and out via house-elf post, so yours can go along with that if you like. Just send it to me and I'll make sure it gets where it's going._

_I've been informed it's your birthday, so many happy returns. There's a little something you might like in the parcel. Thirty-two days until Hogwarts!_

_Don't let the Muggles get you down,_

_N. Tonks_

_P.S. Don't eat it all at once._

Grinning, Harry ripped into the parcel to discover an assortment of fascinatingly named sweets, from Cauldron Cakes and Pumpkin Pasties (which looked like they would come in handy should he be denied meals at any point in the next month) to Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans (complete with a handy guide on the back of the box to help differentiate green apple from grass and toffee from earwax) to Chocolate Frogs (both Original and Crunchy, which featured realistic bones made from crispy rice). He opened a Chocolate Frog immediately, catching it in the air as it attempted to escape, and began to clear off the cluttered desk. For the first time ever in his life, he had more than one letter to write.

 _In this world, anyway._ He smiled as he dug paper and pen out of the desk drawers, thinking of the correspondence Henry maintained with the friends he'd made during the twice-yearly visits of the Blacks and Reynolds to magically-inhabited areas of England or Scotland. _They might even be real on this side too. That'd be brilliant._

_But I'll find that out in thirty-two days. Just now, I have to write Tonks a thank-you note, and then tell Draco what happened when I got my wand, and how Professor McGonagall's planning on sneaking me out of here…_

* * *

"Now, Dudley," said Vernon, dodging a blow with the Smeltings stick (some knacks never quite left one) and sitting down beside his red-faced son. "Just you listen to who was here a moment ago, and what she had to say."

"I don't _care!_ " Dudley bawled aloud, pounding his heels against the floor. "I _need_ that room! Make him get _out!_ "

"Oh, we will." Vernon laughed under his breath. "We will. But we've got to be strategic about this, Dudley. We've got to think it through."

The jovial tone in his father's voice slowly sank into Dudley, who snuffled a few times and blew his nose on one of the tissues Petunia was holding out to him. "Think what through?" he asked, blotting at his eyes. "It's _my_ second bedroom. He's got no right to be in there. Especially not while I'm away at Smeltings!"

"You're quite right, Dudley, he hasn't." Vernon leaned in closer to his son. "But how would you like knowing that while you're away at Smeltings, having the time of your life, that _he_ was somewhere else, somewhere he'll get what he truly deserves at last? And all you'd have to do to make sure it happens is let him have that room for the next fortnight or so, and then you get your friends together and wait for him to come along…"

Dudley began to look interested.

* * *

… _so then he said, "I think we must expect great things from you, Mr. Potter,"_ Harry wrote rapidly, Merope the barn owl watching the moving end of his pen with interest. _"After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things—terrible, yes, but great." Because_ that _isn't creepy at all. Was he that bad with you, or was it just more of my being The Boy Who Lived?_

_Speaking of people who get nicknames, I think I'm going to start collecting ways I can mess about with the things people call You-Know-Who. How does He-Who-Must-Be-Hyphenated strike you to start with?_

_Like Tonks told me, thirty-two days until Hogwarts. Don't let the purebloods get you down._

_Hope to hear from you soon,_

_Harry_

Folding up his letter and tucking it into the smaller of the two envelopes he'd found in the desk drawers, Harry sealed and addressed it before sliding it into the larger envelope with the note of thanks he'd written to Tonks earlier. "Here you go," he said to Merope after this in its turn was sealed and Tonks's name written on the back. "Thanks for the help."

Merope hooted softly and took the letter in her beak, then spread her wings and launched herself out the window. Harry held his breath, waiting for a bellow from Uncle Vernon or a shriek from Aunt Petunia, but none was forthcoming, and he exhaled slowly, glancing around his bedroom— _his_ bedroom—with a smile.

_I wanted this life to start looking more like Henry's, and it's happening. A room of my own, a pile of books I've either always wanted to read or want to read again, seeing my parents' pictures and finding out more about them, even the chance to go away to Hogwarts and learn magic…_

The only other things he could think to want weren't things at all, but people, and even those were starting to accumulate.

 _And maybe I can make some more progress on that tonight._ A yawn interrupted his train of thought momentarily, and he pulled off his jeans and trainers, deciding just for tonight to go to bed in his T-shirt, since the rest of his clothing was still downstairs in his cupboard. _Now that Mal and I both know what we know, we can start working towards figuring out who everyone else is, and where they are._ Yawning again, he switched off the light and crawled between the sheets. _It shouldn't take long, once we both buckle down to it._

_It shouldn't take too long at all._

* * *

Henry Blake's eyes shot open just before the punch to his mattress from below. Grinning, he rolled over and stuck his head over the edge of the bunk. "Oh, Dra-co," he sing-songed, careful not to pitch his voice loud enough to wake the still-sleeping girls across the room.

The improvised bedcurtain slid aside, and Henry pulled his head back just in time as a pillow shot through the space where it had been. "You _know_ how I feel about that damn name," snarled Mal, following his pillow off the bed. "And you, by the way, are out of your mind. What if that hadn't been me?"

"Then I would've had a pureblood kid who thought I was mad, which they're probably all going to think anyway because I'm not rabidly anti-Muggle after living with the Dursleys most of my life. Not that big a deal." Henry shrugged, swinging himself off the bunk and landing with a soft thump on the floor. A brief shiver ran across him at the impact, but he ignored it. "You never mentioned you'd found Dora on that side of things."

Mal shrugged. "You don't remember everything from one side to the other, y'know? At least I don't, not when I'm here. I try to forget about it the best I can, except for the funny bits. Which Lucius Malfoy, let me tell you, is not. I'd like to make _his_ dreams come true." He pressed his fingers to his temples, in the same gesture Draco had used earlier at Madam Malkin's. "But you know about that."

"Yeah, I know." Henry frowned as his fit of shivering recurred, joined by a dull headache. "Wait, do I? I can't remember."

"Sure you do. Think about it some, it'll come to you." Mal glanced over his shoulder, where Jeanie was starting to stir. "Maybe we should take this somewhere else. We don't want to wake them up. Or maybe we do, what d'you think?" He grinned, but the expression looked strained. "Ask them right out if they're dreaming the same sort of things we are, and if their names on that side are the same as what their names used to be on this side, because if so I've got an idea about Uncle Ry but you're not going to like it—"

"Hang on," Henry interrupted, sitting down on the edge of Mal's bed as a wave of dizziness washed over him. "I don't feel right."

"Nor do I." Mal sat down on the floor with more speed than style. "Oof. That may've been a mistake." He swallowed hard, pressing a hand against his chest. "What the hell—"

"Don't know, but I don't like it." Henry tried to get a clear thought through the pain-filled fog now swirling in his head. "Maybe we shouldn't be doing—whatever we're doing. Prob'ly a mistake."

"Gonna say yes," Mal muttered, starting to lower himself into a prone position. Halfway there, his elbows gave way, and he collapsed to the floor.

Henry tried to struggle to his feet, tried to shout for his parents, his aunt and uncle, but nothing wanted to work. His vision fogged over, and with the last of his strength he groped for the small plush animal lying on Mal's bed, flinging it as hard as he could across the room. Somewhere in the back of his mind he seemed to hear a low, satisfied laugh—

And then his world was darkness and screaming, and biting, bitter cold all around.

* * *

Jeanie Reynolds grunted as her brother's stuffed badger hit her in the chest. "Mal, 's not funny," she mumbled, sitting up and rubbing sleep out of her eyes. "What're you—oh, _no!_ " The exclamation tore out of her as she catapulted free of her covers at the sight of her brother crumpled on the floor, her cousin slumping backwards onto the lower bunk. "Pearl, wake up! Get the grownups, we need them!"

"Huh?" said Pearl sleepily. "How co—" Then she gasped, and Jeanie heard scrabbling behind her. "Mom!" her little cousin shrieked in her shrillest tones, awakening a chorus of confused voices from the other bedrooms. "Mom, Dad, wake up, something's wrong with the boys! Uncle John, Aunt Gigi, we need you!"

"Come on, you two, come back," Jeanie murmured, rolling Mal carefully onto his back and making sure he was still breathing (he was, even if it sounded like a frightening amount of work), then reaching up to the bed to do the same with Henry (whose breaths were shallow but present). Neither of them responded at all to her touch, and both sets of hands were cold and limp in hers. "Don't give up on me now. You know where you belong, you know where you ought to be—follow my voice, I'm right here, you can make it…"

A sudden wave of anger shot through her, and she leaned over her brother, glaring at him over their clasped hands. "You get back here right this minute, Malcolm Lyall Reynolds," she snarled. "I am _not_ going to Hogwarts alone this September!"

Mal's fingers contracted suddenly around hers, and his eyes shot open as he gasped in a full breath and started coughing. "That…was scary," he wheezed out between bouts of shivering. "Sounded…like Mom…"

"Someone call me?" said a voice from behind them, and Jeanie shuddered in relief as her mom dropped to the floor beside them, lifting Mal into her arms. "You can let Henry go now, love," she said to Jeanie. "Pearl and Thea've got him."

Glancing up to see that this was true, with Henry's sister perched beside him clinging to his other hand and his mother leaning over him with her wand running up and down his body, Jeanie released her cousin and scooted over to occupy her mom's free arm. Her dad, his red robe askew, knelt down and wrapped all three of them in a hug, holding on tight. "The next time you want to give me an early-morning heart attack," he murmured to Mal, "I'd appreciate a day's notice first."

"I don't even know what I did." Mal's shivers had mostly stopped now, but his face was still drawn and his eyes bleak. "We were just talking, Henry and I, about—"

Gigi laid a finger on her son's lips. "What you were talking about may be part of the problem," she said softly. "We'll work it out once we have all of you back safe and sound, hmm?"

Mal nodded once, then buried his face in the shoulder of his mother's yellow bathrobe.

* * *

He didn't know where, or even who, he was. Cold and darkness surrounded him, filled with lines of light in every color he'd ever imagined light could be and a few he hadn't, some of them seeming to pulse with welcome, others glowing with sullen revulsion.

Part of him yearned towards the lines, while another part shied back. The lines meant worries and fears and decisions, thoughts and feelings and memories, and memories especially were terrible things. Memories were filled with screams and blinding green lights and cold, cruel laughter. Memories hurt, and he was tired of hurting.

Maybe it would be better just to stay in the darkness forever.

Closing his insubstantial eyes, he curled himself into a ball and let his mind drift as he waited for forever to begin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so we see that dream-travel is not exactly the safest thing ever to happen. Next time: what exactly is going on here, and how to fix it, if it can be fixed…also, a few more points will be settled to your satisfaction, O readers, if not yet to that of the characters. Stay tuned!


	9. Between the Worlds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As of this chapter, a certain last name has been changed, and will shortly be altered throughout the entire story. If you've been reading all along, my apologies for the retcon. It seemed like a good idea at the time. If you've only just found this story, you have no idea what I'm talking about, so onwards!

"Well, this isn't good," Thea murmured, running her wand up and down Henry's motionless form. "Child, what _have_ you done to yourself?"

Ryan couldn't speak for his son, but he knew what the waiting was doing to him. Waves of cold rolled across his skin, the scream he was repressing by sheerest willpower echoed inside his ears, and he was grimly certain that any second the white-walled bedroom before him would shatter, dissolving into the dark and grimy stone which bordered his other world—

" _Stop_ that," hissed Gigi's voice in his ear, accompanied by a sharp pinch to his upper arm. "The last thing we need is to be dragging you out of whatever this is too!"

"Tell me something else to do and I will," Ryan retorted as John escorted his own two children to the large bed across the room and cast a quick spell around it to ensure they wouldn't disturb anything. Both Mal and Jeanie had appeared convinced this latest eruption of trouble was all their fault, an attitude Ryan was sure John would nip in the bud. His friend had taken to parenting that intelligent, sensitive pair as though he'd been born to it.

_And speaking of born…_

"Daddy," his little girl called quietly, lifting her head to peer through the bars of the bunk-bed ladder at him. "We need you."

Ryan squared his shoulders for an instant, trying to steady his nerves, then crossed the room to kneel beside the bed. Henry was alive, he'd been able to smell that from the doorway, but there was a disturbing emptiness about his little boy, an emptiness not familiar to Ryan Blake but all too well known to a man who shared his general form and many of his abilities.

_Except that's ridiculous. He can't possibly have been Kissed. We'd have known if we had a dementor in the house, for one thing, and it never would have stopped with just him, for another._

_But what_ did _happen to him, then?_

"His soul's been pulled free of his body." Thea didn't stop whatever she was doing, her voice the flat monotone of the fully focused Healer. "They're still connected, it's recoverable, but wherever he is, whatever's happening, it's draining him. He can't hold on much longer."

"Can you pull him back?" Ryan took Henry's free hand in his, wincing at how cold the fingers were. _Hang on, kid, don't give up. We're going to get you out of this._

"Not from here. Something's blocking me." Thea looked up at Gigi, and a brief conversation composed entirely of facial expressions took place. "But if we had someone we could send in after him, someone who could fight what's got him, that might work." She turned her eyes to him, fear for the little boy they'd so long ago taken as their own imperfectly shielded by her Healer's detachment. "And if that someone had a close blood relation to another person who stays behind, a person who is also related to the Healer keeping alive everyone involved…"

Inwardly, Ryan swore with vicious, fervent creativity. Anything involving his soul leaving his body scared him down to his marrow, even without the hints of opposition his wife had carefully dropped, and his writer's mind had come up with a dozen ways, right off the bat, that this venture could go horribly wrong.

_But if I don't…_

"Do it," he said aloud, taking Pearl's free hand in his other one. "Do it now."

* * *

John Reynolds sat on the edge of the bed with his daughter leaning against his shoulder, his son curled up almost in his lap—

 _They're nothing of the sort,_ the nitpicking portion of his mind objected. _You know that, you've always known that. Why do you keep playing this game, when it can only ever break your heart in the end?_

 _They may not have been born mine,_ John answered patiently, as he had so many times before, _but they're mine now._ He lowered a hand to Mal's fingers, nodding as he felt their temperature edging back up towards normal, then let his head rest briefly against Jeanie's, smiling when she snuggled closer in response. _And having dreams of the lonely life I might have had if things were different doesn't change the way things are here and now._

 _Deceiving yourself—_ that part of him began again, but John was in no mood to listen. Silencing the voice as firmly as he'd learned to do with his wolfish urges when the moon was close to full, he let his eyes rest on Mal, waiting until the boy shifted to look back up at him.

"What exactly were you two up to?" he asked.

"Mom said maybe I shouldn't say just yet, in case it started happening again." Mal shivered briefly, staring through the slight distortion of the spell at his cousin, lying still and silent on the bunk with his parents and sister beside him. "Or in case I made it worse for Henry somehow—but how did we do anything to begin with?" he burst out, fear spiraling into anger. "We were just talking! How could words let something grab hold of us like that?"

"Ever heard of _spells_?" asked Jeanie pointedly.

"We weren't doing spells!" Mal pushed himself partway upright to glare across at his sister. "We were just—"

"I beg your pardon," John broke in, moving further back on the bed to accommodate Mal's new posture. "Did you say something grabbed hold of you?"

"That's what it felt like." Distracted (as John had intended) from his burgeoning fight with Jeanie, Mal wrapped a hand against his father's upper arm, tugging gently. "Like this, sort of. Only nobody was touching me, and I didn't actually go anywhere…"

"A pull on your soul, perhaps." John waited until Gigi looked around from whatever the Blakes were doing and beckoned her over. "Someone caught hold of your soul in some way, and drew you out of your body."

"Is that possible?" Jeanie looked appalled by the very thought. "It should have killed you! A body without a soul is—"

"Not necessarily dead, but not going to be in good shape, either," said Gigi, who had crossed the spell boundary in time to hear this. "At least if that condition continues for any significant period of time. But this one didn't." She went to one knee, offering her arms to Mal, who slid forward into her hold with a shuddering sigh. "There now, love," she murmured into his hair. "It's over, and you're safe. Thanks to our Jeanie." Lifting her eyes, she smiled at the young witch so named, who flushed nearly as red as the blanket on which she was sitting. "Who knew just what to do to break that kind of magic." Still holding Mal, she turned to look across the room at the Blakes. "Now all we can do is wait."

"And pray Ryan does as good a job of it as you did, love." John drew Jeanie into his lap, unsurprised when she came without resistance. "Though I've seldom found it cost-effective, or wise, to bet against your uncle when his family is on the line…"

* * *

If he hadn't been so terrified, Ryan thought, trailing Henry through the black nothingness might have qualified as fun. His method of locomotion in this bizarre not-a-place felt like a mix between swimming and flying, both of which were generally accomplished more easily in his human shape, but the faint and fading traces of his boy he was following reminded him more of scent than of any other sense, which argued for a certain amount of his other form in his current manifestation—

 _And while I'm thinking about that, I'm not paying attention to what's around me._ He did so, sharpening all his senses and moving as silently as he could manage. _Thea said Henry was pulled out of his body. That argues for somebody to do the pulling. And she also said she was being blocked, which means whoever it is, they don't want him getting back to us again._

_Just off the top of my head, I can think of one person who wouldn't want my little boy to have what he deserves…_

Soaring over a cluster of lighted lines, he pulled to a halt as a rank and far too familiar odor assaulted his nonexistent nose.

_And here he is now._

Floating in the blackness nearby, distant from any of the lines but visible by a faint light of their own, two forms could be seen. One was that of a black-haired boy about eleven years old, curled in on himself with his face buried in his arms, the glow at his center flickering and fading even as Ryan watched.

The other could have been drawn straight from a puppeteer's nightmare. A skull-like face and a pair of long-fingered hands were the only three-dimensional things about an otherwise empty set of black velvet robes, which hovered beside the figure of the boy, darting here and there about him, occasionally whispering something to him which made him hunch more deeply into himself or passing a hand across him and siphoning away a bit of the remaining light at his core.

_Turned soul-eater, have you, Snakeface? Two can play at that game…_

Ryan shut his eyes (or whatever he had at the moment which served that purpose) and sought for his link back to life and light and sanity, the painfully tight grip of his baby girl's determined hand on his, and her mother's unwavering strength beyond that. Thus anchored, he dived into his memories, seeking one that would give him the hard punch of emotion he needed, a joy so deep it was almost painful—

_Got it._

Squeezing Pearl's fingers in thanks, he let a moment from seven years past wash over him.

_He roused, momentarily panicked, until he could identify the chill in the air as proper to a February night, the dimness as that of his back corner bedroom, the lingering smell as a diaper in need of attention in the crib beside the bed. The whimpering cries which had filled his nightmare, though, continued unabated._

_Sliding out of bed without disturbing his wife, he hurried barefoot across the hall. The nightlight on the dresser, shaped like a rearing Abraxan, showed him a tiny black-topped head turning restlessly back and forth against its pillow in the middle one of the three toddler beds. Swiftly he went to his knees beside the bed and laid a hand on the child's shoulder. "Henry," he said, administering a gentle shake. "Henry, wake up."_

_Green eyes popped open and focused on him, a small face filled with relief beneath its scarred forehead, a little brown hand shot upwards and latched onto Ryan's equally brown wrist. "Daddy," Henry breathed. "I had a scary dream."_

" _I know, kid. I get 'em too." Ryan pitched his voice low to soothe his son,_ his _son now, whatever his nightmare tormentors might have to say on the subject. He knew better, in his sane and waking moments, than to think his best friend of eleven years and the immensely practical girl that friend had married would quibble over issues of nomenclature when it was their child's happiness on the line. "But that's all they are, is dreams. You'll always wake up from them, and you'll always be right here, safe and sound. And so will I."_

_Pushing himself upright in the bed, Henry fixed his eyes on Ryan. "You promise?"_

" _I promise." Ryan reached around with his other arm and gathered up his boy, settling him onto a hip and getting to his feet. "Come on, I have to take care of your sister's stinky diaper real quick, but then we'll go on out to the kitchen and have something tasty just for us, and drive the cats crazy 'cause we won't let them have any."_

_Henry giggled once, then rested his head trustingly against his father's side._

Filled with the soaring joy of that moment, Ryan opened his eyes to the blackness of the void between the worlds and snapped his wrist, feeling a familiar shape settle into his palm. Two words filled the whole of his mind as he slashed his wand through the proper motion for a charm he'd often wished he was still able to perform in his dreams.

His Patronus, the bearlike Grim, bounded forth and charged at the empty shape of Voldemort, which fell back, startled by this sudden attack where no attack should have been.

" _Henry!_ " bellowed Ryan, and the boy before him looked up, astonished. For an instant it was a disbelieving Harry Potter who hovered there, and then Henry Blake sobbed once in thankfulness and shot across the intervening distance into his father's embrace.

Voldemort snarled and slashed his hand through the Patronus, dissipating it. "You," he hissed, his eyes fixed on Ryan's wand. "I should know you."

"Can't say I've had the pleasure." Ryan brought his wand up onto target, halting Voldemort in his tracks. "Don't much care to have it now. This, by the way…" He wrapped his free arm more tightly around Henry, who was clinging to his side. "…is mine, and I think I'll be taking him home now." Focusing for a moment on his physical body, he tugged twice on Pearl's hand, the agreed-upon signal for success and retrieval. "Say goodbye, Henry."

That young man lifted his head from Ryan's right shoulder and looked around at Voldemort. "Goodbye, Henry," he repeated dutifully, before proceeding to thumb his nose.

The last thing Ryan saw before his vision blurred into the semblance of a Portkey journey was Voldemort's lipless mouth dropping open in shock.

* * *

Pearl held tight to her parents' hands, focusing her thoughts, her strength, her magic on what she desired, as she'd learned to do when she wanted to slip downstairs to inspect her mother's cauldron and ingredients without getting caught. _Dad and Henry,_ she thought with careful clarity, envisioning her handclasp as a rope by which she and her mother were pulling their wandering ones back. _I want them home. I want them safe. And I want it to happen now!_

Beside her, Ryan stiffened, then slumped against Thea, who dropped her wand to catch him, easing him into a more comfortable pose on the bed. "Got him," Pearl's father said tiredly, opening his eyes enough to spot Pearl and give her one of his famous grins, then widening it enough to include her mother and the Reynolds family across the room. "He should be back in just another second here…"

As if on cue, Henry tensed and groaned, then started coughing. Thea sighed, a trace of a chuckle in the sound, and kissed her husband on the cheek before moving around him to reclaim her wand and start a thorough going-over of her son.

Sliding off the bed, Pearl headed for the kitchen, letting the sounds of relief and rejoicing behind her guide her feet in one of the patterns she'd learned at last week's dance camp. If there was one thing about which she could be sure when it came to her family, both nuclear and extended, it was that tea would be wanted in large quantities after any period of stress or strain.

She had the electric kettle started and was just filling the teapot with hot tap water to warm when another set of footsteps sounded behind her. "How well you know us, love," said Aunt Gigi, laughing through her words. "Let's get out both pots, shall we, and make our special tea for the world-wanderers, to welcome them home again?"

"Okay." Pearl held out her hands for the second pot and began to fill it with hot water as well. "Is that what happened to them? They got caught in between two worlds?"

"More or less." Aunt Gigi opened the glass door of the corner hutch and took out two apothecary jars, one filled with black tea leaves and the other with dried catnip. "After all, what are dreams but another world where we're allowed to come and visit sometimes?"

"I wish I weren't." Pearl made a face. "My dreams are _boring_. Mama goes to work and I go to school and we both come home to the apartment in Aunt Amy's same building, and sometimes we do things with her like baseball games or trips to the lake, and other times I go to dance class or Mama goes to choir practice, and we both have our shows and go to them with Aunt Amy and clap for each other. And that's okay, but…"

"But it isn't the life you like best," Aunt Gigi finished for her when she stalled on the words. "It isn't the life you wish you had all the time."

"Uh-uh." Pearl shook her head. "It isn't _bad_ , but it's like you call Henry's dreams. The gray life. Even being a witch isn't exciting, because Mama's so strict about never, ever using my magic wrong, and to her that means almost never at all. And she's always so _sad_ in the dreams. I wish she wasn't." Leaning against the counter, she regarded her aunt curiously. "Do you know why she is? I mean, other than you. And Uncle John and Mal and Jeanie. And Daddy and Henry, I guess," she added grudgingly.

"I think you've named pretty much all her reasons, sweetheart." Aunt Gigi sat down at the kitchen table, a trace of sadness coloring her eyes. "Your mama and I have been friends since we were younger than you are now. She's the one who tried to stick me with a horrible nickname after I fell down on my roller skates and hurt a whole bunch of my friends, and broke my own nose in the bargain." She grinned, tapping a finger against this feature of her face. "Lucky for me, it didn't take. But it's a sad thing, isn't it, to be apart from your friends? And your mama and I don't have any choice about being apart in our dreams, no more than your mama and daddy do."

"Why not?" Pearl reached up to the cabinet above the counter and started taking out plates. "I mean, I know about Daddy even if I'm not supposed to, Mama shouldn't have taught me how to research if she didn't want me to find things out, but why can't you be in my dreams too? Did something happen to you there?"

"Yes." Her aunt gazed into the distance, as though seeing what had been and what could never be. "Yes, something happened to me there. A lot of different somethings happened to me there, and all of them put together means I can never go back again. Though why I don't go forward instead…" She shook her head with a sigh. "Idle dreams and wishes," she said, getting to her feet. "That's not the way to live, you know, Pearl. Picking up the pieces, whatever it is you've been left with, and moving on works much better."

"I know." Pearl set her stack of plates on the table and returned for silverware. "But it doesn't hurt any to wish, does it? Especially not when you have magic."

"No, it doesn't hurt any at all." Aunt Gigi smiled, though her eyes were still sad. "So let's wish together, shall we?" She held out her hands, and Pearl took them. "I wish— _we_ wish," she corrected at Pearl's indignant sniff, "that we could find the right way to make all our dreams be happier, very soon. And to make this wish come true, we offer…"

"We offer the work of our heads, our hands, and our lives," Pearl put in one of her uncle's favorite phrases. "To bring about this wish of our hearts."

"Yes, we do." Aunt Gigi squeezed Pearl's hands tightly, and received her answering squeeze. "So let it be done."

"So let it be done," Pearl echoed, before turning to retrieve the kettle as it switched itself off with boiling.

* * *

After establishing to her own satisfaction that all three of the day's far-travelers, whether inadvertent or deliberate, were safely back in one piece, Thea beckoned to Jeanie, who had begun to look distressed by the carefully worded questions Ryan and John were putting to their sons. "Let's go sit in the main room," she said, leading her niece into the hallway, where Pearl was waiting with a tray filled with cups. "They can talk about the whichness of the wherefore all they want to, and you can tell me what's troubling you."

Rather than answer this immediately, Jeanie took a cup of the greener infusion from Pearl's tray, pressing a kiss to her cousin's braids by way of thanks. Thea helped herself to a mug of tea and held up a finger to halt her daughter where she was. Stepping into the bathroom, she lifted up the cover on the laundry chute and Summoned a pair of vials from her potions nook. "Here," she said, handing them to Pearl. "The green for Henry and Mal, the gold for your father."

"Yes, Mama." Pearl slipped into the bedroom, River following her with black nose hopefully uplifted, and Thea shut the door behind her. Jeanie had already gone down the hall to the main room, where Firefly had claimed a spot on the couch next to her. Thea took the brown-upholstered chair and sipped at her tea, waiting.

"Why are they so obsessed with those stupid dreams, anyway?" Jeanie burst out at last. "So they dreamed about meeting each other last night. Big fat hairy deal, when they see each other every day in real life! Why should we _care_ about what might have been? We have lives here, and we should be thinking about getting on with them, not obsessing over things that never really happened!" She steadied her mug with her other hand, but it still wobbled. Silently, Thea cast a No-Spill Spell over it. "I wish we didn't even—"

A little shudder ran through Jeanie, and she shook her head. "No. No, I'm not going to do that. That's the kind of thing that gets girls into trouble in the stories, wishing without thinking it over first." A smile came reluctantly to her face. "Like not remembering you've been given three wishes by a fairy, and wishing you had a sausage."

"Oh, Gigi," Thea called out promptly. "We have a wish for a sausage over here!"

"Sausage heard!" Gigi called back, in the manner of a short-order diner cook, making Pearl giggle as she came out of the hallway with her now-empty tray and Jeanie's smile turn a bit more true.

"Your dreams still trouble you, don't they." Thea watched her niece as she dipped a finger into her mint-smelling mug and held it down for Firefly to lick. "Not for the same reason as the boys', but they do."

"The boys have it easy." Jeanie stuck out her tongue in the general direction of the front bedroom. "At least they know which side they belong on. Which side they prefer. I…" She swallowed hard, and Thea saw a telltale gleam creep into the downcast brown eyes. "I don't. Or I do," she admitted after a momentary struggle with herself. "But I don't want to! It feels so wrong, so disloyal, because the me in the dreams has her real _parents_ , but…"

"But they don't quite understand you, and never really will," Thea finished. "They love you, they're proud of you, they want the very best for you, but there's just that little indefinable barrier between you, and there always will be."

Jeanie nodded, stroking Firefly as the cat nuzzled her hip. "I could just scream, every time Henry and Mal go on about how much they hate their dream families," she said. "They ought to try loving them instead, and see how hard that is."

"Don't I know it." Thea sighed deeply, turning her head to look out into the bright morning sunlight. "Don't I just know it."

* * *

"Well, this ought to make you happy," said John to his son after a round of careful cross-questioning had established exactly what had happened in the front bedroom of 2319 Tudor Lane that morning, and what had happened in the dreams the night before. "Your birth name is going to have to go on a list of words we don't say out loud around here."

"Really?" Mal brightened, then frowned. "Wait. Why?"

"Because that seems to have been what set this off." John sipped at his tea. "What began it, at any rate. I can't say either of you went out of your way to make it better. Magic is rooted in belief, which both of you know perfectly well, and still you decided to talk as if your dreams are completely and entirely real. I'm not surprised you managed to summon up a very real and very dangerous enemy."

Mal looked away, but Henry sat up a bit straighter on his side of the big bed. "But we never have before," he said. "And we've talked about the dreams loads of times. What changed?"

"Kid's got a point." Leaning against the wall, Ryan took a swallow from his own cup of tea, laced with the potion Thea had sent in by way of Pearl. "These two have been telling us stories about their what-if dreams from the time they were old enough to remember them, and all we ever got out of it were some laughs. Why all of a sudden can't they so much as say a couple names without causing havoc?"

"Maybe because we met?" Mal hazarded, making a face over the taste of his mug's contents but drinking it down dutifully anyway. "We've always known our dreams were likely to be similar, we did come from pretty much the same place after all, but we've never known they were really and truly the _same_."

"Which means," said John slowly, "that they must have a certain level of reality. Not just one person imagining what life might have been if we hadn't found each other, but multiple imaginations working together." His eyes slid sideways to Ryan, who returned the glance without expression. "And since we don't know which other imaginations are involved here—or rather, since we know at least one, and that one decidedly dangerous—I would say a fair degree of caution is indicated in talking about these dreams. As well as one very clear understanding." He fixed each boy in turn with a firm stare. "They are not necessarily indicative of reality. In other words, you are not to count on anything you learn there as also being true here."

"Might even be better if you try and put them out of your mind most of the time." Ryan hadn't moved, but John could smell the tension wafting off his friend from across the room without an effort. "Trying to be one person's hard enough. Two's damn near impossible."

"Says the author, who has to be multiple people, all at once, every time he writes a story," murmured John, causing Mal a brief fit of snickers and Henry to dive under the bedcovers. "In any case, boys, if I were you, I'd try lying back down for a while. You're likely to have drained yourselves out with that little stunt, and a bit more rest wouldn't hurt anything."

Since Henry hadn't reemerged and Mal's eyelids were already beginning to droop, this advice was taken without much demur, and the older wizards removed themselves from the bedroom, stopping in the hallway for a long look, eye to eye.

"Go on and ask," said Ryan finally. "You never have, and I know you want to."

John sighed. "Padfoot—what the _hell?_ "

"I don't _know!_ " Ryan turned away to pound his fists lightly against the wall. "I swear to you, Moony, I don't know what happened any more than you do. I just started having these dreams, a couple months after I became a godfather. Dreams of Azkaban, and this feeling, like a warning. Watch out, stupid, don't make the same decision I made, or this could happen to you." He thumped his fists against the wall again. "Bastard hasn't ever bothered to say _what_ decision. Or rather, he has, but how do I know what's true and what isn't after he's been sharing personal space with the soul-suckers that long? He could've flipped his lid and made everything up the way he wanted it to be, or even pulled out of _my_ head what happened _here!_ "

"So you dream of being falsely accused. Falsely imprisoned." John nodded. "But then, who would want to admit, even in his dreams, that he was a spy and a traitor?"

"Nobody." Ryan turned back to face his friend. "So we're back where we started. I know what I know, or at least I think I do, but it'd be my word against the world unless Wormtail turned up all of a sudden, and who's going to listen to me anyway? And you're not about to start pushing for anything just because of a dream, and I don't blame you. As far as he's concerned, the other you, this might be nothing more than wish fulfillment, and they could make your life hell without even trying hard. But if you should ever happen to come across some solid proof one way or the other…"

"You'll be the first to know." John smiled slightly. "Well. Maybe the second or third. I might send off an albatross to America first."

"Albatross," sing-songed Ryan, chuckling through the word. "Speaking of which, we'd better start planning when we're heading over there to get everybody's school supplies…"

* * *

Walden Macnair startled awake. Someone was bending over his bed. He started to grope for his wand, then stopped. Faint but unmistakable, his left forearm had begun to throb.

"Do you know your Master, Macnair?" whispered a voice he had never thought to hear again.

"My Lord!" Macnair slid quickly out of bed to kneel at the feet of the robed, masked figure. "My Lord, you have returned!"

"Yes, but it must remain secret for a time." The Dark Lord's voice was hoarse and whispering, as though he had been through unspeakable pain in the years of his absence. "I have work for you, Macnair. Work very like what the Ministry has given you to do. Destroying dangerous animals, is it not?" The soft, cruel laugh Macnair knew so well rolled over him. "On the island of Azkaban there lives an animal named Sirius Orion Black. He is dangerous, Macnair, and I want him destroyed…"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a bit of a longer chapter, but I think it was necessary. Thank you for putting up with the Black/Blake name change, everybody. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch "MASH". Leave encouragement and maybe I'll get us off this cliffhanger soon!


	10. It Takes All Sorts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The change in warning status is because of this chapter, to avoid spoiling. It applies only to possible character death. Thank you.

Something sharp and hard smacked into the back of Harry's hand. He groaned a little but didn't move. It was always possible that a box had dropped from the top of a stack and hit him, and if he held still he might be able to fall back to sleep.

_Not that last night was so great in the dreams. Getting pulled out of my body would be scary no matter where it happened. But at least it was on that side of things, so Dad was there to come and rescue me. And afterwards was good, even if I did have to spend most of my birthday in bed or on the couch. I still got cake and presents, and cats sitting on me, and we all started planning our trip to London for school shopping…_

The sharp thing struck the back of his hand again, eliciting another groan, but also a thought.

_Am I still there? Still being Henry? Pearl did get that Dervish and Banges' Good-As-Live Rubber Chicken from her pen-friend Cassie when she turned nine at the start of June. Putting it on my bed so it could peck me on the hand would be just the kind of thing she'd think was funny. Besides, there's sunlight in here. And a breeze. I don't get those in the cupboard under the stairs._

_Still, it doesn't feel right, or smell right, to be Tudor Lane…_

The third peck was accompanied by a bad-tempered hoot, sending Harry's eyes shooting open.

He wasn't at Tudor Lane, but neither was he in the cupboard under the stairs. Instead he was in what had been Dudley's second bedroom until the night before, dressed in only the T-shirt Professor McGonagall had magically fitted to him on the way to Diagon Alley. A number of brown blobs (so far as he could see without his glasses) were lying underneath the open window, and an annoyed-looking tawny owl was perched on the edge of his mattress, sticking out its leg, to which a small scroll was tied.

"Sorry." Harry grabbed his glasses from the nightstand with one hand and started to loosen the knots on the scroll with the other. "Hope you haven't been waiting long." The brown blobs, with the help of his glasses, resolved themselves into a stack of parcels neatly bound up in brown paper, and the scroll came free quickly once he had both hands to untie the knots. "Thanks." He glanced out the window at the bright sunny day beyond. "Would you mind waiting in here for a while, maybe even until tonight? It's a Muggle neighborhood out there, so they're not used to owls. I can get you some water, and maybe something to eat if you like."

The owl considered this, then bobbed its head up and down before spreading its wings to flap to the railing at the bottom of the bed. Harry wondered for a moment what Aunt Petunia would make of the talon scratches on the woodwork, then abandoned that thought in favor of tearing open the scroll.

 _Harry,_ it began, in Professor McGonagall's handwriting,

_I realized last night when I got in that I'd carelessly had all your clothing sent to my attention, not your Hogwarts robes only. I've rectified that now, along with adding a precautionary spell similar to the one on your schoolbooks. Your relatives, and any other Muggles who look at you while you're wearing these clothes, will see you dressed in your cousin's castoffs as usual._

_You also started me thinking with your questions about Aletha Freeman, so I've checked the records. According to the magical registrar, she does indeed have a child. Meghan Lily Freeman was nine years old on 1 June, and although she was born in America, her mother has filed all the proper paperwork to have her added to the list of prospective students for Hogwarts, so you'll be meeting her there in just over two years' time._

_Don't forget what you still need to do this summer. A story, after all, is only as good as its weakest chapter._

_I look forward to seeing you at Hogwarts in September._

_Yours truly,_

_M. McGonagall_

"Nine years old on 1 June." Since none of the Dursleys were present to demand what he meant by it, Harry didn't bother to mask his smile. "Check and double-check."

_Looks like I might have that little sister after all._

"Not that I really wanted her, of course," he muttered, getting up to open one of the parcels (socks, neatly rolled together in pairs). "She's a proper little nuisance and I could have done just as well without her. At least I'll have two free years at Hogwarts before she gets there."

From the other side of his dreams, he could have sworn he heard Pearl blow a raspberry at him.

* * *

Nymphadora Tonks, dressed in her maroon Auror apprentice robes, hurried through the maze of cubicles which was the Auror Office without really looking where she was going. Her foot caught on a jag in the floor just outside her mentor's cubicle, and she stumbled, but caught herself on the opposite side of his doorway.

"Easy there," said Kingsley Shacklebolt, looking up from his _Daily Prophet_. "Where's the fire?" He raised an eyebrow. "On your head, I see."

"Oh, stuff it," Tonks muttered, willing her hair back to pink from its current phone-box red. She wouldn't have dared say anything of the sort to any other Auror in the Office, but her mentor had taken very little time to convince her that he preferred an informal, friendly relationship between them.

_When he's not snapping my nose off for making stupid mistakes, that is. But I deserve that, most of the time._

"Sorry, I'm just a bit dazed by this past Tuesday still," she apologized, sitting down in her usual seat to one side of Kingsley's cubicle. "I'd gone down to Diagon Alley to meet up with my cousin on my free time and ran into Hagrid there, and we got to talking, and then Professor McGonagall comes strolling along, and guess who she's taking around to get his school supplies for Hogwarts?"

Kingsley glanced up at her. "Harry Potter?"

Tonks stared. "How'd you know that?"

"Your hair." Kingsley nodded towards it. "It's gone all to lightning bolts."

"Damn it!" Tonks ran her hands along the offending fibers, telling them firmly to turn back to pink and stay that way this time. "Don't tell me, I know," she said with a sigh as Kingsley opened his mouth again. "I'm going to have to get that under better control, if I want my Metamorph to be a help and not a hindrance in this business."

"Doesn't look like I'm needed here any longer," said Kingsley idly. "Suppose I'll just sit back and read my newspaper." He shook it out and folded over a page. "Another one of your cousins in here today," he added before going back to perusing the columns.

"Oh?" Tonks craned her neck, trying to read across the cubicle. "Which one? I've only got about a dozen, on Mum's side, that is. More than that on Dad's, but I doubt they'd be making the _Prophet_ , they are Muggles after all."

"I'm sorry, did you say something?" Kingsley lowered the newspaper. "I wasn't listening. No point, if you're going to be your own mentor from now on."

Tonks glared at him, but gave up after a moment. There was only so much that even her best glare could do against that unshakable Kingsley calm. "I'm sorry for cheeking you," she muttered. "Now which one is it?"

"One of the more famous ones." Kingsley unfolded the paper to reveal its front page. "Have a look for yourself."

* * *

"Sad news in your family today, my dear," said Lucius Malfoy to his wife at the breakfast table, turning the newspaper around to display the headline.

"So I see." Narcissa drew her wand and Summoned the _Daily Prophet_ from her husband's hand. "Found dead in cell by dementors who'd come to investigate unusual noises, Ministry personnel confirm identification, will be buried outside the prison, and so on, and so forth." She sighed, laying the newspaper aside. "I fail to see why this merits such a fuss. It has been nearly ten years since any of this was news."

"Ah, but these terrible crimes will shortly be brought back into the public eye." Lucius tapped a finger against the table. "Or rather, one of their victims will. A child closely affected by that awful tragedy is very nearly the same age as our Draco, and will be starting Hogwarts with him in one month—and here he is now," he added as the son of the house stepped into the breakfast parlor. "Good morning, Draco."

"Good morning, Father. Mother." Draco nodded his head to Lucius and kissed his mother's cheek before sitting down in his usual spot. "Is something the matter?"

"Not exactly." Narcissa folded the newspaper with its headline inside and set it on the chair beside her own. "We were simply discussing one of the less reputable members of my family. Nothing you need to concern yourself with."

"No, indeed." Lucius clapped his hands twice, summoning Dobby from the kitchen. "Fresh tea, and be quick about it," he ordered, and sat back as the house-elf vanished with the teapot. "There are much more important things to discuss. Such as ensuring your personal safety when you go away to Hogwarts. The place is full of Mudbloods, and Dumbledore coddles them shamefully. They'll feel threatened by your obvious superiority, and there's no guarantee they'd be adequately punished if they harmed you, so I want to be sure you're never alone. Young Crabbe, of course, you already know, and I believe Goyle has a boy about your age as well. I'll see about introducing you."

"Yes, Father," said Draco dutifully, but Narcissa caught the tiny quirk in his lips on the side away from Lucius. "Is there anyone else I should make a special effort to get to know?"

"Well, you already know most of the people who're worth knowing, but there is one special case I think I should mention." Lucius looked around as Dobby reappeared with the teapot. "Did you go to China to pick the leaves yourself?" he snapped. "Fingers in the door, five times."

"Yes, sir." Dobby set the teapot on the table and vanished once more.

Seeing the spark in her son's eyes, Narcissa cleared her throat, drawing his attention and Lucius's to herself. "Your father is referring, of course," she said, "to Harry Potter. He has grown up with his mother's Muggle relatives, so while he may be aware of his identity and his fame in our world, he will likely not be prepared for the reality of it. Almost certainly he will be eager to find acceptance among his own kind, to make friends with the right sort of people."

"Like me." Draco grinned briefly. "I think I could do that. But…" He paused, looking worried. "There could be a problem," he said. "What if the Muggles were…it sounds strange, I know, but what if they were kind to him? Trying to curry favor, maybe? If he likes his relations, he might not listen to anyone who said something bad about them, or about Muggles in general. So if I really want to get to know him, maybe I should sound him out first."

"A good thought." Lucius nodded in approval. "How very Slytherin of you, Draco. And after you sound him out, if you are correct and he is—temporarily, I trust—well-disposed towards Muggles, what then?"

"Someone would need to get close to him," said Narcissa, picking up her teacup to cradle it between her hands. "Become friendly with him. Slip past any barriers he might put up, in fear or in ignorance or both. But that would require being not only friendly, but entirely unthreatening, and that…" She stared down at her tea. "No. It would be too much to ask."

"What?" Draco sat up straighter, looking intently across the table at her. "What would?"

Lucius frowned. "Yes, what are you suggesting, Narcissa?"

"I am suggesting that Draco, if he feels himself capable of it, might attempt to influence his Sorting." Narcissa looked up to meet her son's eyes. "It would be a terrible sacrifice for you, my love," she said. "You would be trapped among people entirely unlike yourself, forced to mingle with half-bloods and even Mudbloods on a daily basis. Or should I say, Muggleborns, since if this is to work we must begin training you in the proper habits immediately. Still, the ultimate reward might well be worth the pains and rigors you would undergo."

Draco looked equal parts appalled and enthralled. "You want me to be a spy?"

"I do." Narcissa nodded, setting aside her teacup. "But perhaps not quite as you think. A spy must either be impossible to remember or impossible to forget, and if you will forgive my saying so, Draco, I have met quite enough of your contemporaries who are impossible to forget."

"No matter how hard one tries," murmured Draco, winning a chuckle from Lucius and a cool smile from Narcissa. "So I'd be the kind of spy who's always there, but always in the background. Everyone sees him, but no one ever thinks anything of it."

"Indeed." Narcissa clapped her own hands twice, and Dobby reappeared, wincing as he slid a plate of breakfast onto the table in front of Draco. "You would be effectively invisible, even more so than if you had the Cloak of legend."

"That sounds like fun." Draco picked up his fork. Then he stopped, and his eyes widened. "But then that would mean I'd have to be—"

"Narcissa!" Lucius started to his feet. "How can you even _think_ of such a thing?"

"What I think, Lucius," Narcissa retorted, snapping her fingers and pointing Dobby towards her teacup, "is that no sacrifice can be too great to bring the Dark Lord back to power. Or would you disagree?"

"No." The answer came instantly, if a trifle reluctantly. "But this—"

"This is not your decision to make." Narcissa lifted her refilled teacup and took a sip. "It is our son's. What do you say, Draco?"

"I say…" Draco poked at a sausage with his fork. "Do you really think it would work, Mother?" he asked, lifting his eyes to hers. They held just the right amount of doubt and reluctance for a pureblood child faced with a decision of this magnitude, but somewhere in their depths lurked a tiny, suspicious sparkle. "I mean, I _am_ a Malfoy. They might not believe it of me, no matter what happens."

"Then it is your job to _make_ them believe it." Narcissa gave her son her sternest maternal glare. "Unless you think it would be too difficult for you, in which case I believe you and I, Lucius, should speak to some of your friends who also have children of the proper age. This chance is too good to waste."

"Mother!" Draco dropped his fork, staring aghast at her. "You wouldn't!"

"If you doubt your capacity to play the part, I certainly would, and will." Narcissa took another sip of her tea. "If you are too fond of your own comfort and security to take a chance for the Dark Lord, to do your part in ridding our world of the encroaching Mudbloods who taint it and the fools who encourage them. I leave it to you, Draco."

"Father?" Draco looked towards Lucius. "What do you think?"

Lucius had spent most of this exchange looking from his wife to his son like a man who had discovered a pair of erumpents in the bed where his pet crups had gone to sleep the night before. Now, slowly, he seated himself, his brow furrowed in thought. "Your mother," he said, as though the words were being extracted from him with tweezers, "has a point. As much as I hate what it means for you, Draco, this could be a chance to slip a spy inside our enemies' ranks completely unsuspected. But you must be willing." He leaned forward, emphasizing his words with sweeps of his hands. "More than willing, you must be devoted to the cause with all your mind and soul. Enough to wait, perhaps for years, until the truth can be revealed."

"I can do that." Draco lifted his chin, squaring his shoulders. "I can." He smiled, the expression uncertain at first but firming after a moment. "It even fits, doesn't it? Loyal, patient, and true." His smile twisted to one side, becoming very definitely a grin. "It never says true to _what_."

Both elder Malfoys burst into laughter, Lucius applauding his son with his fingers against his opposite palm, Narcissa shaking her head playfully. "Be careful of the way you think," she chided her son gently. "You might find yourself Sorted more properly than we wish!"

"Oh, I can fool whoever does the Sorting." Draco picked up his fork again and sliced the end off his sausage. "I can fool anyone."

"And if it were a magical item, instead of a person?" Lucius brought himself back under control, dabbing at his eyes with his napkin. "If you were forced to control not only your actions but your very thoughts, what then?"

"I'd still do it." Draco set his jaw. "You'll see. If this is how I can serve the Dark Lord the best, then I'll _make_ it happen. And I'll do it right, too. You watch." He smiled again, this time a trifle timidly. "Draco Malfoy is going to be the very best Hufflepuff Hogwarts has ever seen."

"I believe you will." Narcissa nodded. "I truly believe you will."

* * *

_Dear Tonks,_

_Upgrade Mother knowing about us from "maybe" to "probably". Also from "neutral" to "friendly". At breakfast this morning she played Father like I play my recorder and the upshot is, he's now_ expecting _me to end up a Badger! And he's halfway to thinking it was all his own idea, for the glory of the Dark Lord, no less! I'm only sorry you couldn't have seen it. It was a beautiful thing._

_Thanks for sending on Harry's letter. Mine back to him is enclosed. I'm glad to know you're looking out for him along with Professor McGonagall. Nothing against her, but I trust you more._

_Was there something in the_ Prophet _this morning about one of our Black cousins? Mother wouldn't let me see the headline. Though if I remember the family tree right, most of them besides you and me and Aunt Andromeda aren't worth the breath it'd take to curse them._

_Write back soon, if your mentor hasn't got your hand cramping up too badly with spell-casting practice. But you could always use a DictaQuill, so really you've got no excuse. Let me know if you think we can meet one more time before I have to leave for school. If Mother really is friendly, we might be able to pull it off. Here's hoping._

_Don't let the Aurors get you down,_

_Mal_

_P.S. Forty-seven seconds this morning, for the whole thing. I'm hoping to get it under thirty-five by September. Any tips?_

* * *

Thea Blake stared into her cauldron, counting silently until it should be time to add the next ingredient. _They're just dreams seven, they're just dreams eight, they're just dreams nine—_

An arm wrapped around her shoulders. She jerked, but managed to keep herself from either screaming or jabbing an elbow backwards. "What have I told you about coming into my potions nook without permission?" she demanded of the person holding her.

"Hmm." Her husband pursed his lips, thinking hard. "That it was manly and impulsive?"

"Yes, that's right." Thea sighed, trying to keep her amusement from showing. "Except I think the word I used was ' _Don't_ '."

"Well, I'm already in, so too late for that." Ryan nuzzled at her ear. "What's wrong, love? Bad night?"

"Worse than some," Thea acknowledged, shying away from too close an examination of the breathtaking grief and accompanying guilt her dream-self had locked away under nearly ten years' worth of iron self-control. "What about you? You didn't seem as bad as you sometimes are."

"That's a fair assessment." Ryan nodded, amusement dancing in his eyes. "Things took a bit of an unexpected turn, you might say. Matter of fact—"

"Dad!" shouted a panicked girl's voice from the main floor. "Daddy, where are you?"

"Down here!" Ryan called back, sparking a four-part chorus of gasps and cries of relief from the kitchen. "What, did everyone have bad dreams last night except me?"

"Daddy!" Pearl launched herself at her father from the fourth step. "You're all right!"

"I told you so," said Jeanie smugly to Henry and Mal as they stopped about halfway down the stairs. "Now will you please stop obsessing over those stupid dreams? Just because something happens there obviously doesn't mean it's going to happen here too."

Pearl wriggled in her father's hold until he got an arm wrapped around her and shifted her to his back. "Mama," she said, pointing. "Should it be doing that?"

"Should it be doing what, love?" Thea turned to look at her cauldron, which was starting to smoke and tremble. "Oops." Quickly, she cast a Shield Spell around it. "Everybody hold on."

The explosion, even contained as it was, rattled the windows throughout the entire house.

* * *

Harry sat at the desk in his bedroom (even after a week of having it, he wasn't tired of thinking that, and suspected he wouldn't be for a while), looking from the newspaper clipping Draco had sent him to the letter which had accompanied it. Finally, turning them both over and pushing them to the back of the desk, he pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and began to write.

_Dear Draco,_

_I don't know what to think either. On the surface of it, everything in the newspaper story makes sense. But then I start thinking about the place we both know—I thought of something to call it, by the way. Professor McGonagall said Henry sounded like my other self, my alter ego. Why don't we call it the alterworld? Everything's certainly altered from the way it is around here!_

_In any case, in the alterworld, he's my_ dad _, and Pearl's, and your and Jeanie's uncle. He'd do anything for us. Like changing his name, giving up everything he ever knew, and moving to another country to make sure we'd grow up safe and happy. And maybe that's just another thing that's different from this world to the alterworld, but maybe it's not. There seems to be an awful lot we still don't know. Doesn't he always say himself that you've got to have proof before you go around believing things about people?_

_Whatever's true in this world, though, we can't do much about it right now. We'll just have to keep our eyes open, and go on hoping things will turn out. At least we still have the alterworld, and getting ready for Hogwarts is even more fun there than it is here. Except for keeping Pearl from booby-trapping our trunks. That's just annoying. Do you think we could bribe her to do Jeanie's instead?_

_I've enclosed what I've been working on lately, in between reading and keeping track of where Dudley's been going when (getting ready for that_ incident _I told you about). After I finally got used to the idea of going to Hogwarts, learning magic, all of that, I started wondering, what if I hadn't had the alterworld, and the grownups to help me figure out what to do with my letter? Would I have just opened it straight away and got confused, and missed my chance to go to Hogwarts because I didn't reply? Or maybe would I have been so surprised by getting a letter of my very own that I would have let Aunt Petunia or Uncle Vernon spot it?_

_Miss Gray used to say it was ironic how often the most horrible thing, in terms of being a person, is the most dramatic or enjoyable thing, in terms of being a writer. So I decided the me in the story was just that stunned, or stupid, or whatever, and he let the Dursleys see the letter. And of course they snatched it away from him and told him it was a mistake, but they also moved him out of the cupboard because it scared them that somebody knew about that. And then, of course, he hadn't read the letter, so another one came the next day, addressed to "Mr. H. Potter, The Smallest Bedroom", and of course the Dursleys didn't let him have that one either. And the next day three letters came, and Uncle Vernon tried nailing up the mail slot, and…_

_But I'll let you read the rest for yourself. I went a little wild near the end. Hope you like it._

_Twenty-five days until Hogwarts!_

_Harry_

_P.S. Bet you a Galleon we spot Jeanie on the train._

Folding up the letter to send with Merope when she arrived after sunset, Harry got up and went downstairs to see what Aunt Petunia wanted him to start for dinner.

A breeze blew through his window, flipping over the newspaper clipping. From its front, a wild-eyed man threw back his head and laughed maniacally, under the headline printed in font size gargantuan:

SIRIUS BLACK DEAD

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I really just did that. Or did I? As the boys have reminded one another, all they've got at this point is hearsay. And I was going to settle it this chapter, but this is too good a breakpoint to ignore. So you get to do a little bit of wondering, until I have time to clear it up.
> 
> If you would like to encourage me to clear it up sooner, there is a new way to do that. Please see either my blog post, [The most incredible thing, part 2](http://www.annebwalsh.com/blog/2015/03/27/The-most-incredible-thing-part-2.aspx), or go straight to [patreon.com/AnneBWalsh](https://www.patreon.com/AnneBWalsh) to sign up as one of my Patreon patrons for my weekly Fiction Friday posts. If I reach my next monetary goal, I've promised to commit to biweekly chapters for this story as long as I am able. And given that my brain is now plotting behind my back, in much the way it did when I was first conceiving of the DV, this story is probably only the beginning…
> 
> Obviously a Patreon pledge is voluntary, based strictly on what you're able and willing to do with your own money, O readers, but if you have ever wished there were a way to pay me back for the writing I do, now there is. Please take a moment to think about it, even if the answer you come up with is 'no' or 'not now'. Thank you.


	11. The Incident

Harry glanced out his window to see where Dudley's gang was (three houses away from number four), then checked his clock. Their routine had varied by only five minutes either way for the last four days, and he felt confident that he could reliably predict where his cousin would be at this time tomorrow.

 _Which means, if I'm reading my 'organic chemistry' book by the window right then, and I just_ happen _to drop it out of the window, and it just_ happens _to knock him in the head…_

He had worried at first about letting the Potions book out of his hold, but a chance encounter with Dudley while he'd been puzzling over a passage from _The Standard Book of Spells, Grade One_ , in the park had told him that the charm on the books extended to their contents as well as their covers.

 _I was scared half to death when he snatched it out of my hands, but then he started trying to sound out all these ridiculously long words that I_ know _weren't on the page I was looking at, and eventually he just threw it into the bushes and took off to find something better to do._ Harry grinned a little, imagining Uncle Vernon picking up the fallen textbook and flipping it open (Aunt Petunia, he was sure, would be far too busy screeching and fluttering ineffectively around her son) only to be confronted with paragraphs of incomprehensible scientific language and impossibly complex diagrams, rather than the lists of potion ingredients and brewing instructions which actually existed within those pages.

 _And once they're done panicking over Dudley and shouting at me, one of them will think to call 'Miss McGrath's office' and report what I've done. She'll come back out here, or send someone else who looks suitably scary, and the Dursleys will be happy to agree I should be shipped off to a 'special school'._ Harry snickered under his breath. _If they only knew how special it really is!_

His grin growing wider, he returned to the sketch he'd been drawing. A stick a bit longer than one of his arms took shape on his paper, with a stiff, broadly-woven net attached to one end, about the same size as his outstretched hand and deep enough to cradle a softball.

"Though why they call it a softball, I don't know. It doesn't feel soft when it hits you." Harry rubbed a spot on his upper arm, wincing at the recollection. Pearl might be small, but the speed and accuracy of her throwing had made her a hot property in the pick-up baseball games held along Tudor Lane since she'd grown tall enough to pitch inside the strike zone. With the force-multiplier of a crosseball stick on her side, she was frankly terrifying, and Henry worked hard to stay in his sister's good books if any gatherings of wizarding families were in the Blakes' immediate future.

 _I wonder what Meghan's like?_ His pen slowed, then stopped, as he gazed out the window, turning his head to face the setting sun. _Is she as much like Pearl as I am like Henry or Draco's like Mal? Or is she more like Jeanie, or Mom, where it bothers her to think too much about her alter ego?_

Pushing aside the picture of the stick used to catch and throw the enchanted item known as a crosseball in the game of the same name, Harry began to draw a diagram, labeling it with names and connecting people with lines where he could. His own name went in the center, his birth parents to the right, with James Potter spearing off to Sirius Black and Lily Potter to Aletha Freeman. Another line connected this latter lady to Meghan Freeman, and a fainter one, labeled with a question mark, to "Gigi" and "Jeanie".

_Since I don't know their names here yet, but I do remember that Mom and Aunt Gigi were friends when they were young, before Mom went away to Hogwarts._

Curving around the top from Sirius Black's name, Harry added "John Reynolds", since he'd spotted a younger (though paradoxically more drawn and worn-looking) version of Henry's uncle in the wedding photograph once James had been convinced to kiss Lily right of center rather than left. He'd considered writing to ask Professor McGonagall for the man's name, but had almost immediately thought better of it. She'd been surprised enough by his interest in Aletha Freeman, and he would have an easier source of information once he reached Hogwarts.

_Hagrid knew my parents too, which probably means he knew their friends, and he's already said he's going to invite us down for tea…_

The thought of "us" led inevitably to the one member of the Tudor Lane household who had, as yet, no place on Harry's diagram.

 _And how he fits in, on either side of the worlds, I have no idea—but wait, maybe I do._ Considering, Harry wrote Draco's name on the opposite side of the diagram from his parents', then sketched a faint line from him to Sirius Black, and a stronger one to Tonks, whom he added in the upper left corner. _Except in that case, like he said himself, shouldn't Mal's surname be Blake? But it's not. It's Reynolds, and always has been._ Slowly, he added the lines from Draco's name to those of the three people whose identities in this world he did not yet know. _He fits right in with them, too…_

 _Except that there shouldn't have been any way for a super-pureblood kid like him to even_ meet _a werewolf and a woman who's practically a Muggle, much less get_ adopted _by them!_

"So there's something I either don't know, or can't remember." Harry folded up the diagram and tucked it inside the nearest textbook, double-checking the cover to be sure it was something other than Potions (Transfiguration, as it happened). It wouldn't do to drop something with so many unusual names out the window tomorrow. "I could ask him, but I don't want to take too many chances. Nobody's around to pull either of us out of it if we start getting dragged away from our bodies here…"

For one instant, he floated in the darkness and chill between the worlds again, before a shout from outside the window snapped him back to the reality of a summer afternoon at number four, Privet Drive. Some of the chill, though, lingered in the vicinity of his heart, along with a thought he hadn't quite been able to banish since he'd seen the clipping from the _Daily Prophet_ , and managed after a bit of mental gymnastics to match the name and face shown there with Ryan A. Blake, owner of the messiest handwriting and fastest draw on either side of the Atlantic.

_What if, just this once, what everybody says is right?_

* * *

Curled up on the couch with a battered copy of _The Ordinary Princess_ , Jeanie looked up as her mother came through the door—

 _Not your mother,_ nagged a nasty voice in the back of her head, _she's not your real mother. Any way you slice it, she's a lie and so are you. None of this ought to be yours, and it certainly shouldn't make you happy, not with what you know had to happen to bring it all about!_

"Hello, love," said Gigi with a smile, then stopped, looking more closely at Jeanie. "Is something wrong?"

"Nothing." Jeanie shook her head and returned to her book. "It's nothing."

"Oh, nothing." The couch dipped as Gigi sat down on the other end of it and lifted down her workbag from the corner where it lived. "All right, then."

 _I hate the way she understands me sometimes._ Jeanie turned a page without having read a single word that was on it. _My real mother…doesn't. Instead she pushes and nudges and pokes at me until I feel like I'll never get any peace if I don't tell her what's wrong. Mom just sits down, does something of her own, and waits until…_

"It's the dreams again," she said irritably as the silence got to be too much for her.

"I thought it might be." Gigi's fingers never faltered on her needles, knit two, purl two, repeat. "How does the prospect of going away to Hogwarts make your alter ego feel?"

"It makes her feel…excited. Well, excited and scared." Jeanie set the book aside. "She's scared that she won't make any friends, that everyone will look down on her for being Muggleborn, that she'll be so far behind everyone who was raised magical that she'll never catch up, but most of all she's terrified of…" She shrugged her shoulders. "Of me. Of having someone find out that she dreams of being me."

"And why is that terrifying?" Gigi glanced to one side just in time to check a furious explosion from Jeanie. "I'm not trying to be stupid, love. I'm asking for her reasons, to see if they match the ones I can think of. Who is she the most afraid will find out? Other magical people, or her parents?"

"Both." Jeanie shut her eyes and reached into the life of the solitary, bookish witch who both was and was not her. "Magical people because she's afraid they'd think she was so desperate to social-climb, or so ashamed of being Muggleborn, that she made up a fake magical family for herself, and her parents because…" Her throat closed around the words, and instead of finishing the sentence she scooted blindly across the couch to Gigi's side, huddling close.

"Will you tell me the story again?" she whispered.

_Because when it's a story, for just that little while, it can all have happened to somebody else, and I can believe what we tell the world. That I'm Jeanie Hope Reynolds, daughter of John and Gigi, and I never was anybody else at all._

"Very well." Gigi turned to one side, allowing Jeanie to snuggle in more closely. "A long time ago, in a country far, far away, lived a young woman named Gertrude, although she hated that name and went mainly by her initials, GG. An even longer time ago, a friend of hers had tried to give her a silly rhyming nickname, but it hadn't stuck. Sometimes GG wondered about that friend, what had ever happened to her after she went away to school, but mostly GG's life was too busy for silly wonderings. You see, not only was she doing very well in her work at the local bookstore, but her parents had surprised both her and themselves the year before. They now had not one, but two daughters, and both of them named for Shakespearean queens."

The story sent ripples of cold down Jeanie's spine, but Gigi's warm hand against her back chased them away again. "GG was amused at the number of their neighbors who thought little Neenie, as the family called its newest member, must be her child. Hadn't they seen her mother Rose waddling around the neighborhood through the previous spring and summer? Hadn't they noticed her father David passing out 'It's a Girl' flyers at the couple's dentistry office for months? But of course, some people don't care about evidence or facts, or anything except a good gossip. Still, the fact remained that GG and Neenie were sisters, born not quite nineteen years apart, and GG loved her baby sister very dearly."

 _Then where is she now?_ the sly voice spoke up again in the back of Jeanie's mind. _Where is Neenie's precious older sister, if she loved her ickle sissy all that much?_

 _Shut up,_ Jeanie snapped as Gigi continued the tale. _I don't have to listen to you._

 _Maybe you don't have to, but you always do anyway._ The voice chuckled. _And someday you might be sorry you didn't listen sooner…_

"…began to have dreams, dreams that felt like a warning," Gigi was saying as Jeanie administered a mental smack and turned her attention back to the story. "First, flashes of terrible pain and fear, then a drifting, floating feeling, like being disconnected from the world. Exhaustion, sorrow, but also a trace of satisfaction, as though she'd done something very hard against truly terrible odds. Distorted voices saying impossible things, and then loneliness, horrible, endless loneliness. And always, every time, the dreams ended with the image of a calendar page—the calendar hanging on the wall in her parents' kitchen, with the seventeenth of August circled in red—and GG would wake up with two words ringing in her ears. _Get out._ "

"Like someone was trying to tell her that something bad would happen that day." Jeanie opened her eyes to look up at Gigi. "And that she shouldn't be at home, because that was where the bad things would happen."

"Exactly. So when her parents announced that they were closing their office on that day, that they were going to take their once-a-year day to do only and exactly what they chose to do, GG offered to take little Neenie out for an airing instead of staying home with her as she'd originally intended. David and Rose were happy with that, and so the plans proceeded." Gigi's voice caught a little on the final word, and she set her knitting aside, tucking her needles through the ball of black-and-gold variegated yarn. "It wasn't until later, until too late, that GG realized she'd never told her parents _why_ she'd changed her plans. And what they chose to do with that day, it turned out, was stay at home themselves."

"And the bad things happened to them instead." Jeanie shuddered, both her personas perfectly at one in this reaction. The stories of war she had heard since she was old enough to understand dovetailed into her alter ego's reading and research far too well for comfort. "You didn't want that."

"No." The denial was instant, vehement. "I didn't want that at all. And I spent the longest time blaming myself, hating myself, wishing it had happened to me instead. I made the decisions that had to be made, I got up and went to work and took care of you, love, but inside I was screaming and throwing things and beating on the walls of reality. Demanding a chance to do it over, to fix that one stupid mistake, the mistake that took them away from me, from us. And if that meant I had to be hurt instead of my mum and dad, so be it. I deserved it." She reached over to the box on the bookshelf, snagging two tissues and handing one to Jeanie. "Until I began to dream again, about exactly what I'd asked for. A chance to undergo that pain myself."

Jeanie looked up from blotting her eyes. This part of the story was new to her. "You did?"

"I did." Gigi twisted her tissue between her hands. "And I came to see that if I had stayed home that day, if all those bad things had happened to me instead, my mum and dad still would have been hurt. It just would have been a different kind of pain. Very like what I was undergoing myself." She slid an arm around Jeanie, half to give comfort, half to take it. "I wouldn't have wished that on my worst enemy, let alone my own parents. As for trying to make sure none of us suffered…could I have?" She sighed, cuddling Jeanie closer. "Would they have taken a warning that came in a dream seriously enough to not stay home that day? I don't know. I can't know."

"And no one is ever told what _would_ have happened." Jeanie frowned. "Except you were. We all are, even today."

"Well, sometimes the rules do change." Gigi bent to lay a kiss on her sister-daughter's head. "And the rest of the story you already know, so I think it's time to move along. Unless you have any more questions?"

"Just one." Jeanie scooted back a little, enough to meet Gigi's gaze directly, brown eyes fixed on brown. "Which world is real?"

"In which world do you love people?" Gigi countered immediately. "In which world do people love you?"

"Both of them." Jeanie shook her head a little at the silliness of this question. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"I know you hate to hear this, but you'll understand more when you're older. For right now, what would you think of treating each world as real while you're in it, and enjoying yourself as much as possible, no matter who you are?" Tucking her yarn and needles back into her workbag, Gigi returned it to its place. "Will that do, until we have world enough and time to look more deeply into metaphysics and the like?"

"I suppose so." Jeanie scowled. "But I like questions to have answers, real answers. Not just possibilities."

"In which case, love, you should have sent back a polite refusal to that Hogwarts letter. In both your worlds." Gigi got to her feet. "Now, if you wouldn't mind rousting those boys out from wherever they are, and telling them they have exactly two minutes to get those crosseball sticks off my front walk before said sticks become _mine_ , to be redeemed only by satisfactory completion of chores…"

* * *

Harry was out in the park the next day, sitting on a bench beside the swings reading _The Horse and His Boy_ (disguised as something called _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_ , which he had a sneaking suspicion was poetry), when a shadow fell across his book. He looked up, and his stomach sank.

_I should have been listening more carefully…_

"Hi, Dudley," he said with mock unconcern, then got to his feet and glanced over his shoulder. "Hi, Gordon. Hi, Malcolm." The two brawniest members of Dudley's gang stared back at him in silence. He had no doubt Piers and Dennis, the skinnier pair, were lurking somewhere nearby, doubtless to intercept him if he tried running. "Does Aunt Petunia want me home?"

"Not yet." Dudley smirked. "But she will in a few minutes. Once I get in all covered in blood, and tell her how you attacked me for no reason, how my friends had to drag you off." Gordon and Malcolm nodded in unison. "And they had to make sure you couldn't hurt me any more, didn't they? Once we're done with you, you won't be leaving the house again until that Miss McGath or whatever her name was sends a car to take you away to the _special_ school." His smirk widened and twisted, turning even nastier than before. "I hear it's out in the middle of nowhere, just for freaks like you."

 _That does sound a lot like Hogwarts._ Harry fought back his laugh. Under the circumstances, he thought it would be misinterpreted. _But I don't want the first time I see it to be through two black eyes! I wonder—maybe this is a good enough reason to use magic and I won't be expelled before I ever get there—_

His hand was on the grip of his wand, concealed inside the hem of his T-shirt, when a low, menacing growl brought all the boys' heads whipping around.

"It came from over there," Gordon breathed, pointing to a nearby clump of bushes.

"No, I think it was there!" Malcolm pointed to a small stand of trees.

Carefully, Harry began to sidle in the opposite direction.

"You're both mad," said Dudley with authority. "It came from—hey! He's getting away!"

Abandoning caution, Harry bolted for the street, only to find himself cut off by a giggling Piers and a snickering Dennis. He fumbled out his wand, hoping he was holding it the right way, and spun around to face Dudley.

 _When dealing with a pack,_ John Reynolds' voice rang in his mind, _always challenge the leader first. If you can beat him, the rest will slink away like the cowards they are._

"Come on if you think you're hard enough," Harry said softly, staring straight at his cousin.

For one instant, his eyes slipped past Dudley, and in that instant a plan shot into his mind.

_Now if I can just pull it off…_

Dudley had stopped short, blinking in confusion at the slender stick in Harry's hand. "What's _that_ supposed to do?" he asked.

"It's a magic dog-calling stick." Harry swallowed hard, praying he could keep a straight face. "You heard the dog growling already. Do you want me to finish doing the magic and bring it all the way here?"

"You are crazy." Nevertheless, Dudley looked uncertainly at the wand. "There's no such thing as magic. You can't make a dog come to you just by waving around a stick!"

"Of course I can't." Harry brought his other hand out of his pocket. "I have to whistle for it too. Do you want me to do that?"

"Go on, then." Dudley crossed his arms. "Let's hear you."

Tucking two fingers into his mouth, Harry folded back his tongue a certain way (as Henry had been taught by his mom two summers prior to this) and blew.

The shrill, clear sound sent Gordon back two hasty steps. Malcolm took three. Dudley alone stood his ground. "So you whistled," he said scornfully. "And you have a stick. Do you really think I'm going to believe that's magic?"

"Ah," said Piers weakly from behind Harry. "Ah, Dudley."

"Uh, uh," was Dennis's contribution, along with a bit of frantic finger-pointing. "Uhhhh!"

Dudley paid them no mind. "If that was a magic whistle," he said, glaring at Harry, "and you used it and your little stick to call a dog, then where's the dog?"

Gordon whimpered once before clapping both hands over his mouth. Malcolm looked unsure whether he wanted to wet his pants or be sick.

"Well?" Dudley demanded, closing with Harry until they were nearly nose to nose. "Where's the dog?"

Harry used the tip of his wand to make a little turning motion.

From behind Dudley came a second growl, this one a bit louder than the first.

All the color drained from Dudley's face, and he turned shakily to look over his shoulder.

The enormous dog behind him, so thoroughly dirty that it would have looked grayish-brown no matter what color it actually was, bared its teeth and snarled before making a snap for the seat of Dudley's trousers.

Dudley's scream could have shattered glass. Harry wasn't sure it hadn't shattered his eardrums. Rubbing the side of his head, he watched Dudley racing away at top waddle down the street, his gang outdistancing him handily as they sprinted towards their own homes. One part of his mind was gibbering in terror of the consequences awaiting him for this, while another part was convulsed in laughter at the contortions Dudley had to go through to run. The rest of him was busy staring at the huge, bony creature which was now sitting wearily on the ground, tongue hanging out one side of its mouth.

_Where did it come from? And why did it do that? And—_

"You're hurt," he said aloud, seeing for the first time the little droplets of red trailing from one of the dog's paws. "And you don't look like you've had a good meal in a long time. You don't have a home, do you?"

The dog looked up at him, then cautiously nudged its head forward. Just as cautiously, Harry raised his hand and laid it gently on the broad, bone-ridged skull. The dog sighed once and closed its eyes, and Harry began, carefully, to scratch, raising puffs of dust with every motion of his fingers.

"I'm going to have to go in a minute," he murmured in time with his scratching. "There's going to be all kinds of trouble from what you did. But…" A sudden thought froze him in place. "Do you know, it may actually not be a bad thing?" Realizing he still had his wand in his other hand, he quickly slid it away into his pocket. "There's a chance this could be something I've been waiting for, something I thought I'd have to do myself—no, more than a chance, this is it!" He laughed aloud as the fullness of it sank in. "It happened, it just happened, and I didn't have to do anything—"

Faint, yet unmistakable, his Aunt Petunia's shriek rose into the air, and Harry groaned. "Here we go," he said, withdrawing his hand. The dog opened its eyes to give him a mournful look, as though wondering why he'd stopped. "Look, just—just stay here, all right? Hide if you have to, but don't go far. I'll be back, and I won't be alone."

The dog thumped its tail against the ground three times, then turned and vanished into the clump of bushes from whence it had come. Harry dusted off his hands, scooped up his book, and ran for Privet Drive as fast as he could go.

Unless he was very much mistaken, the _incident_ which was going to get him to Hogwarts had just occurred in all its glory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And something else has happened, although Harry doesn't know it yet. But you know it, O readers, don't you?
> 
> One of my Patreon goals has been reached! I will be doing my best, from now on, to update this story at least twice a week, to continue to produce quality Fiction Friday posts on my blog, and possibly even to get back to novel-length writing! If you would like to encourage this trend, and if you're able, please consider hopping over to [patreon.com/AnneBWalsh](http://www.patreon.com/AnneBWalsh) and making a pledge!
> 
> If you're not able to pledge money, I understand completely. Would you consider leaving a review instead? It really does make my day to hear something you enjoyed in the chapter, or a question you're wondering about. Thanks, as always, and see you next time!


	12. On the Spot

Harry stopped long enough before entering number four to scout under the hedges until he found a stick about the same size and shape as his wand. His Aunt Petunia, he was quite sure, would recognize a genuine Ollivanders wand on sight, and the cross-country car chase he'd written for himself and the Dursleys in fun would become a highly unpleasant reality.

_I'm not going to let that happen. Not when I'm this close._

Lifting his chin, he opened the door and stepped inside, walking down the hallway into the kitchen, and into chaos.

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HIM?" Uncle Vernon bellowed as soon as he caught sight of Harry, pointing to Dudley, who was wrapped in Aunt Petunia's arms in the corner, having what sounded, for once, like genuine hysterics. "WHAT KIND OF UNNATURAL, FREAKISH—"

Henry's responses surged forward in Harry's mind. About to repress them as usual, he realized at the last second that his alter ego's take-no-prisoners attitude was precisely what was needed here. "I told him a stupid story, and he believed it," he said, allowing his scorn at Dudley's boundless idiocy to show on his face as he never had before. "I saw a dog in the park, so I told him this was a magic stick and if I waved it and whistled, I could make a dog appear." He pulled his substitute wand from his pocket. "The thing is, most dogs will come to you if you wave a stick and whistle, because they think you want to play with them."

"Play with them?" Uncle Vernon snatched the stick from Harry's hand and snapped it, ignoring Aunt Petunia's half-voiced protest. " _Play_ with them? You called that vicious beast over to have it _attack_ him! I don't know where you found that animal, or how you got it to do what you wanted, but you're finished, boy, do you hear me? You are _finished!_ We're ringing up that Miss McGrath right this very minute—" He nodded to Aunt Petunia, who patted Dudley (now down to the hiccupping stage) once more on the head and hurried out of the room, clearly headed for the telephone. "—and you don't leave this house again till she sends somebody to collect you!"

"Fine by me," said Harry as insolently as he could manage when most of his mind was filled with celebratory whooping. "Anywhere's better than here."

"You think so?" Uncle Vernon snorted. "You really think so, boy? After as lenient as we've been with you, as we've _had_ to be—if it were up to me, I would've seen what a few good beatings would do towards breaking that stubborn spirit of yours, but no, we had to watch our step every second, especially after that meddling teacher filed an official inquiry about you!" He threw the bits of stick onto the floor and started to pace. "Oh, it never came to anything, I made sure of that, but we couldn't lay a hand on you from that day forward and now we see what comes of it. Blasted woman kept her job, even. I tried to get her sacked, but the headmistress wouldn't listen, talked a lot of twaddle about good results and happy students and the like."

Harry wiped the astonishment off his face as Uncle Vernon turned back to him, shaking off the past. "But now," the older man said softly, the blotchiness of his face subsiding into a uniform shade of contented magenta. "Now, you're finally going to get what you deserve, and my only regret is that I won't be there to see it."

Aunt Petunia came back before Harry could think of a suitable answer to this. "They'll have someone here within ten minutes," she said, casting a fearful glance towards Harry. "They said not to let him leave the house again…"

"Sit," Uncle Vernon ordered Harry, pointing at one of the kitchen chairs. "Stay."

Stifling his urge to plop down on the floor and pant with his tongue hanging out, Harry took the indicated seat and pulled his book out of his pocket again. Shasta and Bree had just encountered Aravis for the first time, and Harry hadn't been able to stop himself envisioning her as a slimmer, better-educated, female version of Dudley.

_But if I remember the story right, after she has a few adventures and realizes she's not the most important person in the world, she turns out okay. Maybe there's hope for dear little Dudders after all._

He sneaked a glance over the top of the book at his cousin, who was currently stuffing a huge slice of chocolate cake into his face.

_Or maybe not._

Leaning back in his chair, Harry read on.

* * *

Three chapters later, the doorbell rang, and Uncle Vernon went to answer it, coming back with a woman whose face reminded Harry strongly of Ripper the obese bulldog (cosseted property of his uncle's sister Marge, who came to visit her brother's family every few years and sneaked Dudley banknotes while egging Ripper on to chase Harry up trees). "Petunia, this is Miss Nigellus," he introduced the two.

" _Miz_ Nigellus," the woman corrected in a voice like a handful of rocks going through a meat grinder. "If you don't mind. So this is him, is it?" Her eyes, beady brown and set very close together, surveyed Harry from top to toe in one dismissive swoop. "Thought as much. Got troublemaker written all over him. Never you mind, we'll soon straighten him out." From her pocket, she produced a notepad and pen. "What's his name again? Harvey Plotter?"

"Harry Potter." Harry got to his feet, staring boldly at Ms. Nigellus. "And I'm not a troublemaker."

"That's what they all say." Ms. Nigellus snorted. "But you don't get sent where you're being sent for nothing!"

"And where's that?" Harry challenged. "What's it called?"

"What's it called!" Ms. Nigellus started to laugh, reminding Harry of the meat grinder turned on high. "What's it called, he asks! What's the matter, never heard of St. Brutus's Institute for Incurably Criminal Boys?"

"No." Harry felt a sudden fluttering of nerves. If he'd actually done magic without realizing it to summon up that dog, if this was the way he was going to be informed that he'd been expelled from Hogwarts without ever getting to set foot in the castle, if St. Brutus's was the wizarding world's solution to children who couldn't bring their magic under control—

Ms. Nigellus looked up from her pad to rake him with another beady glare.

For the briefest of seconds, both her eyebrows flashed a brilliant shade of pink.

Harry choked, and tried valiantly to look as though he were fighting to keep back an angry outburst. Ms. Nigellus finished whatever she was writing down, snapped her notepad shut, and nodded once. "I'll take a moment with him now, and then he goes straight to his room," she told the Dursleys. "We can keep an eye on him there, make sure he's not up to anything he shouldn't be. You'll want to have him stay in there most of the time for the next few weeks, and we'll contact you closer to 1 September with the arrangements for getting him safely to St. Brutus's. No, don't thank me!" she barked, as both Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia began to do exactly this. "It's my job, and I love it. Now, Harvey, Harry, whatever your name is…"

Attempting to look cowed and uncertain, Harry followed Ms. Nigellus into the hallway, to the bottom of the stairs, out of direct line of sight from the kitchen. The woman pressed a finger against her lips, then twisted her wrist, summoning what Dudley would have recognized as another "magic dog-calling stick", and swooped it twice around them. "All right," she said resignedly, sliding her wand away again. "Let's have it."

Harry succumbed to his fit of helpless laughter. " _St. Brutus's Institute for Incurably Criminal Boys?_ " he managed to gasp out on his third try.

"You try coming up with something on the spot that way!" Tonks, her features restored to their normal conformation, gave him a big-sisterly punch in the shoulder. "Prat. But I do have to ask, how'd you make your cousin think you were setting a big vicious dog on him without getting tagged for underage magic? I ducked into the Trace Room to record my visit here before I left the Ministry, after your aunt rang up that number McGonagall gave her all hysterical and yapping on about a dog, and nothing was so much as stirring on the sensors…"

"Because I didn't do any magic." Harry caught his breath and got himself calmed down. "There really was a dog. And it was pretty big, but it wasn't vicious. Not to me, anyway." He grinned. "It tried to take a piece out of Dudley's trousers. Probably because he had me cornered, with his gang, and it could smell I was scared."

"Huh." Tonks rubbed a bit of her Muggle-style blouse between her fingers, thinking. "Local dog? One you know?"

"I've never seen it before. It's all skinny and dirty, probably a stray. But Dudley and his friends were about to take turns pounding on me, and I would've had to use magic to stop them if the dog hadn't been there…" Harry let the sentence trail off, appealingly.

Tonks sighed. "You and Mal," she said. "Two of a kind. Right, then, hold still." She produced her wand again and rapped him hard on the top of the head with it. Harry bit back a yip, then blinked in astonishment as streamers of cold flowed down over his body, rendering him all but see-through.

"There, you're Disillusioned," said Tonks, her features blurring together until she was a dead ringer for Harry himself. Quickly charming her clothes to match what he was wearing, she nodded towards the front door before snapping her wand towards the hallway, dismissing whatever magic she'd used to render their conversation private. "Now get upstairs and don't you make another bit of trouble for these good people tonight!" she boomed in Ms. Nigellus's voice. "Don't bother to see me out, Mr. Dursley, Mrs. Dursley—we'll be in touch, never you worry…"

Swallowing another laugh, Harry let himself out the front door as his image scurried up the stairs. He was halfway down the walk when Tonks reappeared beside him with a _bang_ like a balloon blowing up, once again looking like herself. "I charmed your bed to look like you're in it," she said. "In case they peek in the door." Glancing over her shoulder, she shook her head. "Merlin's pocket watch, they're really something, aren't they? Like the stories pureblood parents tell their kids about Muggles, only worse, and I didn't think that was possible."

Harry shrugged before realizing this gesture would be wasted, since Tonks couldn't see his shoulders. "You just have to know how to keep out of their way," he said. "I'm used to it by now."

Tonks muttered something under her breath which Harry suspected was uncomplimentary to the Dursleys, then took his arm as they turned onto the pavement. "Lead the way," she said. "Let's have a look at this big, un-vicious dog of yours."

The short distance to the park was swiftly covered, and Tonks reversed the Disillusionment on Harry, leaving him feeling as though he'd had a hot shower, before they began looking for the dog. "What did he look like?" Tonks called as she peered under the bench in the gathering twilight. "Big, you said?"

"Really big, bigger than me." Harry approached a clump of bushes. "And really dirty, too, like he'd rolled in the mud for a while." A rustle from the bushes brought him to a halt. "Over here! I think I found him!"

Tonks was by his side so quickly Harry would have suspected she'd done the popping-out-of-the-air thing again, except that he hadn't heard any noise. "Stay back," she cautioned, drawing her wand. "I know he was friendly to you once, but strays learn to do whatever they have to do to survive. If you make the wrong move and he starts seeing you as a threat…"

The bushes rustled again, and a broad, black nose poked out. "Hey, boy," Harry said quietly, going to one knee so he could see the dog's wary brown eyes. "I told you I'd come back. This is Tonks." He indicated the witch standing beside him, wand in hand but carefully not pointed in the dog's direction. "She's a friend too. You can come out. It's okay. We want to help you."

"You sure about this?" Tonks muttered out of the side of her mouth as the rest of the dog emerged from the bushes. "That thing could pass for a young bear, no problem."

Harry ignored this, instead scooting forward and holding out his hand, fingers curled under so as to be out of biting range. "My name's Harry," he said as the dog sniffed his knuckles. "I don't think we covered that part yet."

"You do realize it's a dog." Tonks was trying to look severe, but the twitch at one corner of her lips spoiled the effect. "It doesn't speak English."

"How do you know?" Harry extended his fingers and stroked along the line of the dog's jaw, then scratched behind one of its ears. "Maybe he's a magical dog. A human being who got transfigured into a dog somehow, or even another one like Professor McGonagall, an Animagus—"

The dog flinched, and Harry withdrew his hand immediately. "I think I hurt him," he said guiltily. "But he's all skin and bones. It's hard to know where's safe to touch him and where isn't."

Tonks sighed. "I knew I should have ignored that letter back in third year," she said, more to herself than to Harry, then went to one knee beside him and the dog. "Arm, please," she said, holding out her hand, and Harry frowned but laid his arm in her grasp. "Good. Hang on tight, now. And you," she said to the dog, who obediently placed a forepaw in her other hand. "Everybody take a deep breath, and hold it."

She started to stand up and turn around, pulling Harry and the dog with her—

And the world squeezed in close and went black all around, giving Harry the sensation that he was being dragged headfirst through a rubber tube much too small for him. He thought he might have yelled in shock, but the sound was lost in the airless compression of whatever this was—

With a _pop_ more felt than heard, light, sound, sense returned to the world. Harry gasped in a breath and looked around in astonishment. The tiny square of trees and grass and playground equipment had been replaced by the living room of a small, cluttered flat, with Quidditch posters and Hufflepuff pennants decorating every inch of wall space.

"My place," said Tonks, releasing both him and the dog, who shook all over as if he'd just climbed out of the water. "Pardon the mess, but I barely have time to eat and sleep some days, much less clean up around here. Kitchen's through there." She nodded towards a door in the opposite wall. "Think I have some decent-sized bowls in one of the cabinets. Why don't you get our friend here a drink, and I'll go make a firecall." She chuckled once. "Since I _know_ what Mal would do to me if I left him out of something as interesting as this. You," she said sternly to the dog, who tried to look like he hadn't been about to start sniffing at the laundry littering the rug. "Sit. Stay."

Harry stifled a laugh and went to get the water, returning with it to find the dog obediently sitting and staying. His eyes brightened at the sight of the bowl, but he held still until Harry had cleared a spot and placed it on the floor. Then he got to his feet and began to lap with surprising daintiness for his size.

After watching the dog for a few moments, for lack of anything better to do, Harry started gathering up clothes, being careful not to look too closely at any of the things he was holding. Tonks was, after all, a witch, and laundry day at Tudor Lane had taught him that witches wore certain items of clothing that wizards did not, about which they had no sense of humor whatsoever.

_No matter how funny it looks to try and turn them into earmuffs for the cats…_

He had a tidy little pile of clothing near one wall and was starting on the scattered pieces of parchment when a loud _whoosh_ caught his ear, and a moment later a slightly sooty Draco appeared in the doorway. "All right, Harry?" his friend asked, raking ashes out of his hair. "Where's the—" His eyes widened as he caught sight of the dog. "Merlin's curtain rods, he's huge!"

"Told you so." Tonks nudged her cousin out of the way and came into the living room behind him. "Ah, Harry, you didn't have to do that. You're a guest here."

"I just didn't want him to slobber on anything you needed." Harry gestured to the dog, who had finished the bowl of water and was regarding each of the three humans closely in turn. "So what's next?"

"Next, we should probably feed him. But not too much," Tonks added quickly as the dog's head turned towards her. "If he's that skinny, he's been on short rations quite a while, and we'll regret it if we try and stuff him like a Christmas goose. He gets small meals, but regular ones—and I know that look," she said to Draco, who was giving her much the same wide-eyed hopeful gaze as was the dog. "You haven't had any dinner yet, have you? Or Harry?"

"I was going to finish reading the chapter I was on and then head back to help with it, but Dudley and his gang came looking for me first." Harry held up a finger to signal 'in a minute' as Draco cast him a curious look. "So I never got the chance."

"Food all around it is." Tonks waved for the boys to precede her to the kitchen. "You stay put," she said to the dog. "I know you want to be into everything, but you're a mess."

"Couldn't you just—" Harry mimed waving a wand.

"I could, but I don't know how he'll take to magic." Tonks frowned. "Though come to think, he took Apparating here pretty well, didn't he? Let me give it a whirl. You two start foraging for sandwich makings."

Tossing her a two-fingered salute, Harry turned and went into the tiny kitchen, where he pulled down plates from the cabinet beside the one where he'd found the bowl earlier. Draco stepped away from the refrigerator with his arms full of bags and bottles, which he started lining up on the counter beside the plates. "Spill it," he said shortly. "All Tonks told me was you found a great big dog. I didn't hear anything about your cousin, or how she got involved in the first place …"

"Professor McGonagall must have asked her if she'd respond to that phone number she gave my aunt and uncle, as 'Miss McGrath'. You remember." Harry went to the sink to wash his hands before assembling his sandwich, as Draco, clearly at home in the flat, climbed onto a clear space of countertop to get at a high shelf which held bags of crisps. "So Dudley and his friends decided they'd catch me in the park and beat me up, say I'd attacked Dudley and they were stopping me…"

By the time Harry had finished his story (Draco dissolving into appreciative laughter at the near-biting of Dudley's behind, and at Tonks's spur-of-the-moment name for the fictional school Harry would be attending), Tonks and the dog had joined them in the kitchen, the dog a great deal cleaner than before but still coated thinly with grime, and with a vague shine on top of his grungy coat. "Sealing Spell," said Tonks when she saw Harry looking at it. "It'll keep the rest of that dirt from going everywhere until we can give him an actual bath. Which, if he's anything like any other dog I've known, he's not going to like, and I'm not sure I want to use magic to hold him for that. He could struggle and hurt himself."

Vague memories from when Pearl had been tiny floated into Harry's mind, and he took a bite of sandwich and chewed to give himself time to think. _Mom had this plastic baby holder for the bath, bespelled for comfort and everything, but Pearl didn't like it, she'd scream and fight and kick, until one day Jeanie asked if she could help…_

"What if a person held onto him instead?" he asked when his mouth was free again. "He seems to like being patted, so maybe he'd sit still for his bath if there was somebody in there with him."

Tonks's lips twitched again. "Are you volunteering?" she asked, her hair turning briefly blue before reverting to her preferred pink.

"Sure." Harry glanced at the floor, where the dog was munching steadily through a bowlful of chicken and rice scrounged from several different takeaway containers. "I found him, didn't I?"

"Why should you get to have all the fun?" Draco objected. "I want in too."

"Now hang on a second here." Tonks set her sandwich down. "You _both_ want to climb in my shower with an enormous, questionably friendly animal? When I'm not supposed to have any one of you here, let alone all three, and if anybody gets hurt there'll be hell to pay from five different directions?"

"He's not going to hurt us." Harry held out a crisp, and the dog sniffed at it, then nipped it deftly out of his fingers. "See? He knows who his friends are."

"Besides, you can put Safety Charms on the shower." Draco caught a piece of tomato which was falling out the back of his sandwich. "That should keep anything from going too far wrong."

Tonks sighed. "Why do I get the feeling I should never have children of my own?" she asked the light fixture. "All right, fine. As soon as we're done eating, everybody gets a general scrubdown."

* * *

Sandwiches eaten and dishes piled in the sink, the little party reassembled outside the shower stall, which Tonks started charming to have softer walls while Harry and Draco stripped down and pulled on the swim trunks Tonks had conjured for them, red for Harry, gold for Draco. Harry folded his glasses and set them beside the sink, where the dog sniffed at them. "Don't you dare," Harry warned him. "I need those."

"You really think he'd hurt them?" Draco asked, too quietly for Tonks to hear over the sound of the water she was now adjusting for temperature. "I mean, look at him. Don't you think he might be…" The seemingly shapeless gesture, upwards and outwards, nonetheless conveyed its meaning precisely.

"I don't know." Harry looked at the dog. The dog looked back, his chocolate-colored eyes innocently curious. "He's the right size, but the wrong shape. Too skinny."

"That may not mean anything." Draco slid his fingers along the dog's side, scowling at the protruding ribs. "Not when he's half-starved. Can't tell anything by his fur, he could be any color under the sun and we wouldn't know it with all this dirt…"

"But his eyes are wrong." Harry grimaced as this detail finally settled into place. "Dad's are bright gray, almost silver, and that's not part of the disguise, it's natural. Pearl's got them too. So he can't be."

"Unless he changed them somehow." Draco's objection had the sound of someone trying to convince himself. "That's not hard, it's just a basic bit of transfiguration, and we know he's good at that."

"But you have to have a wand for it, and where would he get one?" Harry sighed, the half-formed hopes he'd been harboring in the back of his mind dissolving into dust and drifting away on his mental wind. "Suppose he's just a dog after all, then."

"Pretty good dog, though." Draco scratched gently behind one of the dog's ears. "Already knows the difference between people who need biting and people who don't."

"It's ready when you are," said Tonks, turning around. "What's so funny?"

"Nothing." Harry blotted at his eyes with the back of his hand. "Just talking. Should the spell come off him before we go in?"

"Definitely." Tonks directed her wand across the dog, and the shine of the Sealing Spell disappeared. "Right. Troops may advance at will."

"Who's Will?" asked Harry, and dodged Tonks's smack before climbing into the shower. Letting the warm water soak his shoulders, he made encouraging noises towards the dog. The dog regarded the shower dubiously, but after sniffing at the water pooling around Harry's feet and glancing back at Tonks and Draco as though for reassurance, he clambered over the lip which kept the water contained and nosed his way under the spray. Draco squeezed in along the wall, and Tonks pulled the curtain across and secured it with a spell down both sides.

"Be ready," she called over the noise of the shower. "As soon as the water gets through his fur to his skin, he's probably going to—"

The dog set his feet, raised his shoulders, and shook vigorously. Draco had time to throw an arm up to cover his face, and Harry managed to turn away, but both of them still got soaked from top to toe with muddy water. "Thanks for the warning," Harry called back, grinning across at Draco, who was stripping dirt off his arms with a disgusted look. "Can we get some soap in here, maybe?"

A bottle floated up and over the rod from which the shower curtain hung. Draco snagged it out of the air and opened it. "Don't you have anything that doesn't smell?" he complained.

"What's wrong, you don't like watermelon?" Tonks laughed. "Chuck it back, I'll pull out the manly stuff Charlie left behind last time he was over."

Draco lobbed the bottle back over the rod, and Harry caught the replacement, popping the top off. A faint scent of herbs wafted from it, reminding him of the Apothecary or his mom's potions nook in the basement at Tudor Lane. "Better?" he asked, holding out the bottle for both Draco and the dog to approve.

"Better," Draco agreed after taking a sniff, as the dog nudged his snout against the bottle. "I think he likes it too."

"Right." Harry poured a generous dollop of the viscous light blue liquid into his hand, passed the bottle over to Draco, and began lathering the dog. "Who's Charlie?" he asked as he scrubbed.

"Charlie Weasley." Draco nodded towards the curtain, both his hands being buried in grimy fur. "Her boyfriend."

"Ex-boyfriend," corrected Tonks. "Nothing terrible," she added at the boys' noises of sympathy, "it's just that he's headed for Romania to do dragon-ish things, and I'm staying here for my Auror apprenticeship, and that's a bit longer distance than either of us wanted to try on for size right now. We could always pick it back up if he's ever assigned to one of the preserves in Wales or Scotland."

"Speaking of Charlie." Draco scrubbed a bit harder at one of the spots on his side of the dog, then used his hand to funnel the water from the shower onto it. "Guess what color he actually is under all that dirt."

Harry craned his neck to look, and snickered. The clean bit of fur between Draco's hands gleamed distinctly reddish-orange.

"No kidding?" The tip of Tonks's wand traced a circle on the shower curtain, which promptly turned transparent within those boundaries, revealing her face. "Wouldn't have guessed it myself. But we're not naming him Weasel or anything like that," she warned, pointing a finger at Draco. "I know how your so-called sense of humor works."

"He does need a name, though." Harry worked his own lather carefully through the dog's fur, then rinsed away a long strip of brown-gray suds, revealing another swath of coppery coat. "Assuming somebody's keeping him. I can't, at least not for the next few weeks, and the Hogwarts letter said a cat, an owl, or a toad, nothing about dogs…"

"I'd love to have him, but I don't have the space here, and I'm not exactly overflowing with free time, y'know?" Tonks, along with Harry and the dog, turned to look at Draco. "Which just leaves you, little cousin."

"Bet I end up taller than you," Draco muttered.

"Yeah, but you aren't yet." Tonks grinned. "So, you think you can talk Aunt Cissy into this one?"

"Why not? She gives me anything else I want." Draco shrugged. "Other than a normal life and a few actual friends, but I'm working on that for myself. Besides." He squeezed the bottle again, getting another palmful of liquid. "Everybody's going to expect me to be the perfect stuck-up pureblood brat, pulling the 'my daddy's a school governor so I can do whatever I want' card out of my sleeve all the time. Why not use it to get something I'll actually enjoy?" He carefully lathered the top of the dog's head, shielding the brown eyes from soap with his other hand. "How about it, boy, you want to go to Hogwarts?"

The dog's enthusiastic bass bark echoed off the shower walls, making everyone laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember, just because the characters are convinced of something, doesn't make it true. But it also doesn't make it untrue…
> 
> Yes, I'm an evil author. You knew this.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who has pledged at my [Patreon page](http://www.patreon.com/AnneBWalsh), purchased any of my originals, or left reviews at any of my fanfic sites! Your support is greatly appreciated!
> 
> Fiction Friday post on [Anne's Randomness](http://www.annebwalsh.com/blog) tomorrow, another chapter of this story probably on Saturday, and maybe some writing in a different area as well—who knows? Only my Muse, and she's not sharing yet. Until then, cheers!


	13. What's in a Name

"So, what _are_ we going to name him?" Harry asked, leaning against the now clean but still slightly damp dog, who had appropriated a large portion of Tonks's living room floor. Tonks herself was doing something in the kitchen, from which interestingly chocolaty smells were starting to emerge. "It ought to be something you can live with, if you're the one taking him home."

"I don't know." Propped against the dog's other flank and running his fingers idly through soft red fur, Draco shrugged. "Maybe butter up the parents by going with one of the family themes."

"I'd meant to ask you." Harry sat up straighter. "The day we met at Diagon Alley, you mentioned your mother finding a name that combined both traditions. What was that about?"

"Oh, that." Draco grimaced. "Purebloods are big on tradition, if you haven't noticed, and a lot of families have a certain type of name they like to give their kids. Malfoys go for figures out of history, the older the better. Ancient Greece, Rome, that sort of thing. Blacks, on the other hand, prefer either mythology or celestial objects. Both, if they can get it. Like Sirius, or Andromeda."

"Or Draco." Harry smiled innocently at his friend, who made a face back at him. "The Dragon constellation, and one of the monsters the ancient heroes used to fight. But was he somebody in history too?"

"Famous lawmaker," said Tonks, coming in with a tray containing three steaming mugs. "Though his laws went a bit beyond what we'd think of today as fair. Your relations might like them for you, Harry." She handed him a mug. "If somebody says a punishment's 'draconian', that's not a compliment."

"I knew the word, but not where it came from." Harry moved the mug out of the way of the dog's interested nose. "No, you can't have this. Chocolate's bad for you."

The dog sighed and laid his head back on his paws.

"Now I knew Sirius was a star, but not a myth." Tonks handed Draco the second mug and sat down in a battered maroon wing chair with the third. "Who was he?"

"One of the dogs who hunted with Orion." Draco struck a muscle-flexing pose, careful not to spill his chocolate in the process. "The finest hunter of all time."

"A hunter sounds like a good person to name him after." Harry stroked along one of the dog's ears, which was becoming fluffy as it dried. "How about it, boy?" He whistled once, getting the dog's attention. "Orion," he said, distinctly and clearly. "You like that?"

The dog seemed to consider the matter for a moment. Then he barked twice, rattling the glass in the tiny window.

"Good thing I soundproofed this place when I moved in," said Tonks over Harry and Draco's cheering. "Orion it is." She grinned. "Mighty hunter of Muggle trousers." A double swirl of her wand conjured a dog toy shaped like these items, which she tossed towards Orion. He snagged it out of the air and chomped enthusiastically on the spot where the legs converged, making Draco almost snort his hot chocolate up his nose.

_Uncle Vernon did say his only regret was that he wouldn't see me get what I deserved._ Harry handed Draco a serviette, then sipped from his own mug. _Wonder what he'd think of this?_

_It might be funny to find out, but only if I were absolutely certain I'd never see him again afterwards, and that's not going to happen. Not in this world, anyway._

_Though I do wish it were._

Orion tilted his head to one side, as though listening to something Harry couldn't hear.

* * *

Ryan Blake leaned against the side of the living room window seat at 2319 Tudor Lane, gazing towards the east to watch the sun come up. For the first time in more years than he cared to think about, his heart was entirely at peace.

A small noise behind him made him turn his head. "Morning, kid," he said to Henry, who was yawning and rubbing at his eyes. "Care to join me?"

"Thanks." Henry smiled, the uncannily sweet expression which was entirely his own, and padded across the floor to climb onto the window seat next to Ryan. "Met a dog in my dreams last night," he murmured, laying his head against Ryan's shoulder.

"Did you, now." Ryan smiled to himself. "He look anything like me?"

"A little bit. Not much. Colors were all wrong, and he's too skinny." Henry cracked one eye open to peer up at his dad. "Named him after you anyway, or sort of."

"I sort of appreciate that, then." Ryan slid his arm around his son. "Did he do anything fun for you?"

"Almost bit Dudley in the butt." Henry snorted sleepily. "You should have heard him scream."

"Maybe I did, kiddo." Ryan chuckled under his breath as Henry's eyes drifted shut once more. "Maybe I did at that."

* * *

"I just feel bad because I couldn't think of a reason why they ought to let you out of your room more often than to use the toilet or grab a shower," said Tonks the next morning, after she and Harry had seen Draco and Orion off through the Floo fire in her bedroom (Dobby the house-elf was waiting on the other end to artistically re-dirty Orion's fur, after which the two of them would play out the little comedy of 'he followed me home, can I keep him' for Draco's mother). "You're going to get awfully tired of those four walls before September comes."

Harry shrugged. "I've had worse."

"Not the answer I was looking for." Tonks sighed and held out her arm. "Right, get a good breath this time, Apparating quietly always takes longer, and Side-Alonging quietly takes longer than that…"

In Harry's estimation, 'longer' had taken enough time for him to have gone away to Hogwarts and been nearly halfway to the Christmas holidays by the time they finally emerged in his bedroom at Privet Drive. The silence of the house around them, though, meant Tonks had achieved what she'd wanted to do, and they exchanged swift grins and a brief, tight hug before Harry scooped his Potions text off his desk and held it at head level. Tonks stifled a laugh with her hand, her hair rippling rainbow amusement, and turned in place again as Harry released the book.

The slam of hardcover against wood floor effectively covered the noise of Tonks's Disapparition, as well as drawing a shriek from the kitchen. Harry snickered once, then got his face under control and opened his bedroom door as his aunt appeared breathlessly on the stairs. "What was that?" she demanded.

"I dropped a book." Harry tried to strike a balance between looking sullen and contrite. "I'm sorry if it scared you. May I come downstairs for breakfast, please?"

"You stay put." Aunt Petunia pointed her finger at him. "I'll bring you something. You're not to leave that room, do you understand me?"

"Not even…" Harry glanced at the toilet visible across the hall, and Aunt Petunia sighed.

"Oh, all right," she said irritably, waving him onwards. "But make it quick."

* * *

Back in his room, with a plate of cold toast pushed aside in favor of Pumpkin Pasties from his newly resupplied stash, Harry pulled out his diagram again and added the name of Tonks's ex-boyfriend, along with a cluster of others around it. He had gleaned these both from the previous evening's conversation, which had rambled across topics wizarding and Muggle, and from the results of one of Henry's adventures with his cousins three winters back, while the Blakes and Reynolds had been spending two weeks in a little village in Devon.

_Mom said we must have brought our own weather with us, because it snowed for a day and a half after we got there, and of course as soon as it stopped and we were allowed out, we went straight to the one place we'd been told not to go, the little orchard out on the hill near where the village kids had told us the weird people lived…_

He circled the last masculine name on the list he'd just written and drew a heavy line to himself, then lighter ones to Draco and Jeanie. If his parents' predictions and his own suspicions were correct, he would have something in common with this young wizard (already a good friend of Henry's, which Harry hoped would hold true between the worlds) that neither of his dream-cousins would.

_Which means we're going to need a meeting place. Somewhere neutral, easy to get to, but off the beaten path, so nobody trips over us and wants to know what we're all doing there. Wish I had the Map that Dad and Uncle John are always telling us about, that would really help a lot, but we'll manage without it…_

He cracked a smile. _And here Tonks was worried I might get bored these next few weeks!_

* * *

"Correct me if I am mistaken," said Lucius Malfoy, regarding with disfavor his son's kneeling posture beside the copper-coated mongrel which was making short work of a basin of scraps Dobby had provided, "but I had thought the entire point of Draco's being Sorted into Hufflepuff was to render him forgettable. This—" He swept a hand towards the dog, which could almost have doubled as a riding animal for Draco. "—is hardly conducive towards that end!"

"Could any child of yours and mine, Lucius, ever be entirely forgettable?" Narcissa countered. "If he is _too_ self-effacing, we run the risk of people suspecting our plan. Besides, were you not the one worrying about Draco's safety in a House filled with the…sanguinarily disadvantaged, shall we say?" She smiled thinly. "I hardly think anyone will offer him harm with his new companion by his side."

"True enough." Lucius watched as Draco stroked his hand along the dog's sleek back. "But still it galls me, Narcissa, it galls me to the bone to have to resort to strategies and trickery and foolish playacting, simply to ensure the proper order of things will eventually prevail. When we were so _close_." The fingers of his left hand clenched shut, then popped open as he hissed in frustrated pain. "If I had only moved faster on the day the Dark Lord fell, if I had not been so blind to Dumbledore's plans—"

"Who could possibly have guessed that the infant hero of wizards and witches everywhere would be placed with a family of Muggles?" Narcissa broke in soothingly. "Certainly not I. My own thought would have been my cousin Sirius. He was the child's godfather, after all. But it seems he was also one of us, though the Dark Lord kept it well-hidden." She sighed. "Such a pity he could not have controlled himself better after it all fell apart. If he could have talked Peter Pettigrew around, or even cast a spell which targeted only him and not one of wholesale destruction, Sirius might have been able to maintain his cover, claim his godson, and raise him properly." A smirk touched her lips. "He and Draco might even have become friends."

"That would have been very nearly ideal." Lucius nodded. "But some part of me still wishes I could have intercepted the boy on my own account. Hidden him in plain sight here at the Manor, as some distant cousin's child orphaned by the war." He laughed aloud. "Which is, I suspect, nothing more nor less than the truth, given the degree of interrelation among pureblood families! And then Draco would have had not only a friend but a boon companion, almost a brother…"

"But if you had failed in your attempt to take the boy, if you had made even the smallest mistake, you would have opened yourself, and us, to a very different fate." Narcissa's voice turned icy. "Or would you prefer to awaken tomorrow morning locked away in a cell in Azkaban, to know that our son was being raised by strangers, that I myself was dead, and that the home of the Malfoys for hundreds of years lay abandoned and crumbling into ruin?"

Lucius shuddered, shaking his head convulsively as though to throw off the very idea. "My worst nightmares, to the life," he said with an attempt at lightness. "Have you been spying on my dreams, Narcissa?"

"It was hardly difficult." Narcissa regarded her husband coolly. "The worst nightmares of any man are liable to be those of reversal. All that he has, taken away from him, and replaced with something as close to its polar opposite as is possible in this world."

_Only my dreams of that sort are entirely different._ The thought would not, could not, be stifled, although Narcissa was sure no trace of it had shown in her expression, as Lucius nodded carelessly and turned back to his regard of their son and his new pet. _Reversal, yes, that without a doubt—a small set of rooms instead of a spacious manor house, a quiet round of domestic chores and entertainments in place of the social enjoyments of a pureblood lady, even my name turned back on itself for an entirely new identity. And while a husband and a child still are mine in that life, surely they could not possibly be more unlike the ones I own in my waking hours!_

But if the opportunity to fall into her dreams and never again awaken had been offered to her, Narcissa knew she would have snatched at it with both hands.

_Still, one small part of those dreams does exist in my waking world._ She smiled, allowing a tenderness to creep into her eyes that very few people ever saw. _And I may be able to steal a few hours from today to go and see that small part, if Lucius carries through with his proposed visit to the Ministry to see what they know about Walden Macnair's current whereabouts and Draco's time continues to be fully occupied by his new friend…_

* * *

The doorbell rang at 2319 Tudor Lane, startling River off the back of one of the armchairs. "I'll get it!" Pearl shouted, already halfway to the door.

Stopping short a pace away, she took a single deep breath, then turned the knob with decorum. "Hi," she said through the screen door to the black-haired, bespectacled woman standing on the front stoop. "Can I help you?"

"Yes." The woman looked closely at her face. "Yes, I believe you can. If your parents are home?"

"My mom is, and my aunt Gigi and my cousin Jeanie. My dad went out with the boys and Uncle John to a baseball game. They should be back later. Mom!" Pearl turned to call into the house, pitching her voice to carry downstairs to her mother's music room. "There's somebody to see you!"

"How many times have I told you, young lady," said Thea, coming around the corner from the kitchen, "that you are not to shout in the house?" She saw the woman on the stoop and stopped short. "Well," she said after a moment. "Good afternoon, Professor. I suppose I should have been expecting this."

"Should you?" Minerva McGonagall (as the woman must be, Pearl realized, for her mother to use that form of address so readily) raised an eyebrow. "I was frankly rather astounded when Albus finally told me where you've been all these years. May I come in?"

"Of course, please do." Thea gestured her daughter back from the door. "Pearl, put the kettle on, love, and then go find your aunt."

"Aunt?" Professor McGonagall asked, turning the handle on the screen and stepping inside as Pearl hurried into the kitchen to fulfill the first part of these instructions. "I didn't think—"

"A courtesy title. Gigi was a dear friend of mine before Hogwarts, and the first person I thought of when I found out…" Thea shrugged. "But I think you know that story already, or you wouldn't be here. Her Jeanie is technically her younger sister, but they lost their parents before Jeanie was even a year old, so she's been raised almost entirely by Gigi, and later by Gigi and John together." The amusement in her mother's words had Pearl stifling a giggle of her own as she filled the kettle at the sink. "Along with their Mal, of course."

"Of course," agreed Professor McGonagall in a carefully expressionless tone. "I don't mind telling you that's one of the stories I was hoping to hear straight from the horse's mouth. If you'll pardon the expression."

"Why shouldn't I?" Thea's voice hummed now with satisfaction. "It's certainly a favorite of mine, and better than anything Ryan could invent. Our enemy outwitting himself, not just once but over and over again. Losing what he already had by snatching at foolish dreams, like the dog in the fable who tried to take the meat away from his reflection in the stream. The guilty were punished, as many of the innocent saved as possible, and something very dangerous got into the right hands to neutralize it before it could do any more harm. Stories don't often turn out that neatly. Not in the real world, anyway."

_No, the real world is supposed to be more like my dreams._ Pearl stuck out her tongue at the reflection in the glass door onto the deck as she set the kettle on its base and flipped the switch to start it heating. _Where I'm all alone and Mama's always sad and Daddy's a crazy criminal when he isn't_ dead. _Which I don't believe, either part of it, because he always_ says _don't believe things without proof and_ I've _never seen any proof of it, so there!_

Pushing her dreams aside for the time being, she trotted down the hall to the bedrooms, first poking her head into her aunt and uncle's room to tell Aunt Gigi that a visitor had arrived, then swinging around the corner into her own room, where Jeanie was lying on the bed reading, and excavating her bucket of Connect-o-Blocks from its place against the wall. One of the most important lessons her brother and cousins had taught her was that a quietly occupied child was all but invisible to most adults, and this was a conversation she didn't want to miss.

_Since unless I'm really, really wrong, it might mean I get to see my friend Cassie a lot sooner than I thought I would…_

* * *

"Explain this to me once more," Minerva requested, glancing up at the photograph on the wall which featured the woman sitting across from her and the child who had opened the door earlier, along with the other two members of their family. "The boy in this picture is named…"

"Henry Blake." The woman Minerva had to remind herself was now called Thea nodded briskly. "My son and Ryan's, Pearl's brother, Mal and Jeanie's cousin. I'd be astounded if he thinks of himself any other way more often than he must."

"We've never concealed from him that he was born with another name, and with different looks," said Gigi Reynolds from the kitchen, where she was pouring mugs of tea. Gigi had been a stranger to Minerva until today, but Minerva found herself strongly approving of the other woman's good sense and matter-of-fact attitude towards life. "He knows his own story, and that of his birth parents, but I honestly think he would consider any revelation of his original identity on the order of a personal disaster."

"Oh?" Minerva frowned. "Why is that?"

"Apart from its placing him, and all of us, in a certain level of danger?" Thea shot a brief, laughing look at Gigi, who only sighed and set down the teapot. "Henry's not shy, per se, but he strongly prefers to stay out of the spotlight unless he's earned it on his own merits. And the longer he's established in the wizarding world as Henry and nobody else but Henry, the longer that's going to be possible for him."

"Which gives us a very potent weapon if, as Albus fears, You-Know-Who—oh, thank you," Minerva said as Gigi offered her a mug. "If _he_ should truly not be dead after all. In furtherance of which, my visit today." She took an appreciative sniff of the tea, then set it aside to cool. "Albus has agreed to house a very important item at Hogwarts for a time. As a favor to a friend." Feeling somewhat foolish, but recalling her directive to name as few names as possible in the context of the present day, she drew a copy of Dumbledore's Chocolate Frog card from her pocket and handed it across to Thea. "If you understand me."

"I do." Thea ran her finger along the lines of text, then exchanged the card for a mug of tea from Gigi. "I think I do. The pinnacle of alchemical research, isn't it, with only one of them known to exist in the world?"

"Precisely. So if our enemy is observing Hogwarts, he's likely to think that any additions to staff for the year are intended to safeguard that item." Minerva accepted the card back from Gigi and returned it to her pocket. "For instance, Albus is thinking of working around the constant turnover in the Defense Against the Dark Arts post by hiring an assistant professor in that subject." She looked directly at Gigi, who was just settling back into her own chair, mug in hand. "Quirinus Quirrell has not been noticeably improved by his year on sabbatical, and his touch with the younger students has always been less than ideal. Someone with children of his own would be a valuable addition to the department."

Gigi inclined her head, but made no other comment.

"Also, Poppy Pomfrey has been saying for some time now that the variety of ways in which Hogwarts students manage to injure themselves over the course of the school year means we ought to have a fully qualified Healer available to us on an emergency basis at least, if not resident full-time." Minerva turned her attention to Thea. "One who also understands Muggle medicine would be especially helpful, since so many of our students come from a mixed background and may need some explanation about how magical healing works."

"I see." Thea was beginning to smile. "And what is the current policy at Hogwarts about professors or other staff members who may be married, or have dependents, or both?" She glanced towards a stretch of floor which was almost invisible under neatly arranged lines of blocks, pegs, and fasteners, radiating outward from a deeply occupied little girl and the sculpture she was constructing around a grey tabby cat, asleep in the patch of sunshine coming through the screen door.

"Our Potions professor, as it happens, shares his quarters at the school with his wife and child for the majority of the year." Minerva looked over the top of her spectacles at Thea. "Although I will want your personal guarantee that you will keep that from becoming a problem. The last thing we need is the rekindling of old grudges, especially when it would assuredly lead to your unmasking." She turned the look on Gigi. "Yours as well. Though I admit your husband's role was usually confined to that of the passive observer, or the extra pair of hands conscripted in spite of himself."

"Both of them have grown up a great deal more than you might think possible, if you only knew them in their salad days," Gigi assured her. "Especially with the children's welfare in question, they'll cooperate. And if they so much as think about starting trouble, I'll roll up the biggest newspaper I can find and beat them both about the head with it until they promise to behave."

"That I would pay good money to see." Minerva chuckled. "Then we can take it as settled, I assume?"

"Speaking for myself, I'd certainly be happy to accept." Thea drew her wand and Summoned a sugar cube for her tea. "I'm sure John will feel the same, and you've always said you'd like to have seen Hogwarts," she said to Gigi, who nodded eagerly. "As for Ryan, he claims he can write anywhere. I think I'll challenge him to prove it."

Minerva laughed. "Perhaps the greatest surprise, that," she said. "I've read his books, and enjoyed them, but I never guessed his true identity. Though perhaps I should have, when in one of them, he had his characters employ a similar trick to the one he played on us all those years ago. Hagrid has still not entirely recovered from the shock."

"The baby doll?" Thea took a long drink of her tea. "Yes, that was rather neat. I wish I could take some credit, but I didn't even know what was going on until afterwards. I had certain other considerations taking up my time." She nodded towards sculptor and sculpture, which now resembled a slightly abstract version of its still-sleeping feline occupant. "Like that one."

"I've always wanted to ask." Gigi swirled her own tea gently in its mug. "What _did_ happen on Privet Drive that night, when you realized what he'd done?"

"Hagrid used a few phrases which I won't bother repeating in present company, but which I certainly felt like repeating at the time." Minerva nodded at both women's grins. "And Albus looked momentarily stunned, but then his eyes began to twinkle. You know what I mean," she added to Thea. "It seems he had been doubting his own wisdom in making this decision for most of the day, and only the knowledge that Harry's physical safety would be best ensured by the protection of the blood wards had kept him steadfast. But now, when the choice had been taken out of his hands, he wasn't above a bit of misdirection on the subject."

"Misdirection?" Gigi frowned. "How do you mean?"

"He laid a very complicated spell over number four, Privet Drive, a spell which looks as if it ought to completely conceal something, though in reality it's merely a tangle of magical lines which do nothing productive at all." Minerva smiled. "And then he, and I, and Hagrid, all went away and spread the news that Harry Potter had arrived safely at his Muggle relatives' home, and that for his greater protection, a combination of the Fidelius Charm and a reversed Muggle-repelling spell had been cast over him. Meaning that no matter how closely they watched the house, no one magical should ever expect to be able to catch so much as a glimpse of him."

A stifled squeak burst from Pearl. Gigi pressed a hand across her mouth. Thea lowered her teacup, her eyes shining with admiration. "So for the last ten years," she said, "the Death Eaters have been trying to see a person who isn't actually there?"

"I thought you would like that." Minerva chuckled, picking up her now sufficiently cooled tea. "Of course, how we plan to explain his non-arrival at Hogwarts is another matter altogether, though the rumor mill may take care of that for us. I've been hearing people state confidently for years that Harry Potter is being so carefully concealed to keep it hidden that he turned out to be a Squib, or that the elaborate precautions are to keep the wizarding world from learning that The Boy Who Lived in fact has died, while a small but very vigorous faction claims that he was secretly adopted by a pureblood family and will surely be Sorted, under his assumed name, into Slytherin…"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, lots of balls in the air right now, and several storylines running concurrently. But then, that's the experience the characters are having as well. Almost all of them do experience both worlds, though some of them remember more and some less.
> 
> The next chapter may be a bit delayed, as I'm going to need some recovery time from the Easter Triduum and all the singing I've been doing. Send encouragement in the form of favorites, reviews, or blog comments at [Anne's Randomness](http://www.annebwalsh.com/blog), and the delay could be shorter than otherwise!


	14. Turn, Turn, Turn

After making sure the boys were thoroughly absorbed in their favorite baseball-related pastimes (Henry keeping box score and Mal pointing out everything he was doing wrong), John turned to look directly at Ryan, who had his feet up on the empty seat in front of him and was cracking peanuts between his fingers as though he had no other care in the world.

After a few moments, Ryan started to fidget. After a few more, he turned to glare back at John. "Would you _stop_ that?" he finally exploded.

"Thirty-eight seconds." John tapped his watch. "New personal best for you, Padfoot."

Ryan growled under his breath and flicked a peanut shell at his friend. "Mr. Padfoot would like to express his astonishment that he has not murdered Mr. Moony in his sleep long since."

"Mr. Moony thinks that the ladies of the household might have a few words to say about such pastimes," John returned readily. "But speaking of murder…"

"Ah, hell." Ryan sighed. "How'd I know it was coming around to that."

"Because of what my esteemed alter ego read in the newspaper over a week ago, and because you've been sleeping better ever since then, while Thea and Pearl have been worse." John helped himself to a handful of Ryan's peanuts. "So either the story was true and you're not dreaming any longer because there's nothing to dream about, or it was true and you're dreaming about some sort of blissful afterlife, or…"

"Yeah." Ryan rubbed two peanuts between his fingers, removing their papery coatings. "Or." Letting the papers fall to the ground, he popped the peanuts into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. "See, I don't know how much good it'll do to tell you any of this," he said once he'd swallowed. "Are you going to remember it, or believe it if you do?"

"Maybe, maybe not." John shrugged. "But I can't see how it'll hurt."

"Famous last words if I ever heard them." Ryan picked up his plastic cup of beer and took a long drink from it. "All right, fine. Good news to start with: the other me wasn't as mad as I was afraid he was, and the stuff he was warning me about, I mostly got right on this side of things…"

* * *

Remus Lupin awakened just as dawn began to erase the stars from the sky, reaching for the dream journal he'd been keeping for several years almost before his eyes were fully open.

 _Similar story to one known from dreams,_ he scribbled rapidly, remembering with a small smile that it had been Aletha who had taught him the spell to magically link together his quill and inkwell years before. _S replaced as Secret-Keeper by P, who was spy all along—S and P face off on Muggle street after J and L die—in dreams, S shot first, killing P, then immediately Disapparated to take H into hiding, but was eventually cleared despite that—in reality…_

His quill slowed and stopped as he gazed down at the page. What he was about to write, as marvelous as it had sounded on a sunny afternoon at the baseball park with the boys cheering beside him, felt strange and unnatural with the wan light of early morning trickling through the windows of the remote cottage he called home.

"Just writing it down doesn't mean you believe it," he murmured aloud, and set his quill's tip on the page again.

_In reality, P shot first, cut off own finger to leave traces, blew up street and killed twelve Muggles, changed forms and disappeared as rat—S got off spell too late, shocked by how neatly P had trapped him, then was overwhelmed by everything that had happened and could only laugh._

"Which is exactly what he always used to do when we were in our worst spots back at school, or afterwards, during the war." Remus jabbed the quill viciously into the page for the full stop. "But, of course, the Ministry types didn't know him, so they took the laughter for his having enjoyed killing all those people."

 _Why the difference between worlds?_ he wrote on a new line. _R doesn't know, but thinks possibly because he had more to hope for, more to come back to—S let H go with RH, hadn't heard from A in weeks, thought I might be the spy so had been keeping away from me…_

"Mr. Moony would like to inform Mr. Padfoot that he is an idiot," Remus muttered, setting the quill aside before he snapped it. "But then, assuming any of this is true, Mr. Padfoot has had plenty of time to absorb that thought quite thoroughly." Staring out the window at the trees which surrounded his cottage, he shook his head. "Which brings us to the real core of the matter. This all makes for a pretty little dream, but there's not a bit of it I can prove." He stopped, looking down at his hands, scarred here and there from his full moon nights and with a greyish stain along his right index finger where the quill had leaked a few drops. "Or is there?"

Picking up the quill again, he added a line underneath what he had already written, recalling one of the facts which had led, in the world of his dreams, to the clearing of his friend's name in absentia.

_P had the Dark Mark. S did not._

"And on Sirius, that would have been more obvious than on quite a lot of people." Remus regarded his quill-holding hand with a slight smile. "He tended to cast his spells with vigor. If he'd had anything on his left arm, we would have known about it." He sighed. "Though, of course, that doesn't prove anything. He could have argued that he shouldn't be Marked because the entire point was for him to be a spy, that is, _secretly_ on their side…"

Dropping the quill back into the inkwell, he got to his feet. Arguing could-haves and might-have-beens would get him nowhere even faster than he was already rushing towards that destination.

"At least the dreams have been good for one thing." Remus picked up his wand from the bedside table and headed for the kitchen, turning on the light and bringing the kettle up to boil as he entered with two careless flicks. "'Chronic headaches' are as good a reason as any to miss a few days of work every month. It may mean I'm limited to the Muggle world, since most magical people would eventually realize my headache days lined up with full moons a little too neatly for their taste, but at least I've never starved." He opened the cupboard to locate tea and sugar, smiling one-sidedly. "Not physically, in any case."

 _Emotionally is another matter._ Working by rote, he warmed the teapot, added the leaves, and Summoned the sputtering kettle. _It can't be good for me to wake up every morning yearning for a wife and daughter who may well be figments of my imagination, and a son who would probably run screaming from me if we ever met in the waking world. How that particular portion of Sirius's family got mixed up in my dreams, I'll never know._

"Not that I'd mind doing Lucius Malfoy a bad turn or two. Or three, or four." Chuckling, Remus slid two slices of bread into the toaster and pushed the lever down. "My one regret in the dreams is that I never got the chance to see his face when he found out just exactly _who_ had run off with his precious baby boy…"

* * *

" _I ran those tests on the nursery you wanted," said the female Auror in the hallway outside the room, making no effort to keep her voice down. If anything, she was speaking more loudly than she needed to. "Sure enough, two children, two adults. Only one Apparition trace out, though. The man was Side-Alonging all three of them."_

" _Suppose she must've been a Muggle, then," the male Auror responded, in similarly heightened tones. "Anything strange about him? Unusual magic, Dark or Light?"_

" _A few odd resonances in his aura, so I tried a Bachle Analysis on a hunch." The witch's voice acquired almost a gloating tone, as though she were pleased with this result. "Came back positive. Whoever he was, he's a werewolf."_

Lucius wrenched himself out of the dream in time to stifle his scream of disbelieving fury, a knack he'd learned through painful necessity over the last decade. Narcissa, with her usual acuity, had placed her finger directly on the central point of his nightmares, but he thought she did not fully comprehend their cause as he had come to do.

"Some part of me," he said aloud, using the sound of his voice to calm himself further, "feels guilty that I devoted myself to my own interests on that day of chaos, and thus saved so much from the wreck of our plans, when many of my colleagues and even my Master lost everything." Sitting up, he blotted sweat from his forehead with the corner of the sheet. "It would have been foolish to do anything else—I could hardly have saved them without incriminating myself, and my being punished along with them would have done no good to anyone—but still I feel that guilt, and these dreams are its result."

"Merlin's inkblots," said an amused voice from the corner of the room. "You've got a speck of decency left after all. Never would've thought it."

Lucius had jolted at the first word, and by the end of the final sentence had his wand in his hand, shedding light in the proper direction. "You," he said, staring in shock at the speaker. "You're _dead_."

"Yeah, so?" Sirius Black shrugged from the chair he was occupying in a comfortable slouch. "You're dreaming. Not as bad as your usual run, but still. Just a dream. Nothing to worry about." He waggled a hand in the air around his head. "Tomorrow morning, you'll barely remember I dropped by."

"And why have you…'dropped by'?" Lucius eyed his wife's late cousin dubiously. Except for the scattering of silver through his messy crop of dark hair and the thinness and pallor of his face, Black looked very much as Lucius remembered him. "You certainly don't appear to be a ghost."

"Don't know what I am." Black twirled his wand idly between two fingers of his left hand. "Don't much care, honestly. As for why I'm here, no real reason. Thought I'd say hello to some of the family while I had the chance, see how everyone's doing." He fanned his right hand lazily. "Hello, Lucius."

 _It must be a dream. No waking experience could match this level of surreality._ "Hello." Lucius refrained from waving in return, instead using his wand to turn on the bedside lamps and putting out its light. "So, in your opinion, how am I doing?"

"Judging by that nightmare you were having when I got here?" Black shook his head. "Not so hot. How often do you have those? I'd guess pretty frequently, given you and Cissy are sleeping apart these days."

"That was a personal decision made between the two of us, which is none of your concern." Lucius tried for a tone of quelling superiority. Judging by the smirk on Black's face, it hadn't worked. "Neither, as it happens, are my dreams."

"Uh-huh." Black nodded. "Pretty damn frequently, then. Every night, or as near as makes no never mind. Pardon my colloquialisms, I've done a bit of dreaming of my own. Not much else to do in Azkaban." He glanced sidelong at Lucius. "As you'd know."

"Ah, but I know it only from my dreams." Lucius relaxed as the conversation moved into more comfortable territory. "You knew it from reality, inescapable reality, until finally it killed you. And I still live, well-respected, comfortable, and free."

"You so sure?" Black seemed intent on the twirling of his wand, his voice seemingly idle but with undertones of darkness. "Think about this again, Lucius. We've both of us spent very nearly ten years in Azkaban. I could be mistaken, but we may even have had the same cell. Which would be possible, you see, because only one of us was really there. The other one dreamed the whole thing. But now, here's the sixty-four-thousand Galleon question." He leaned forward, his wand finishing a twirl with its tip towards Lucius. "How do you know which one is which?"

"What?"

"How do you know?" Black swirled his wand in lazy circles in time with his words. "How can you be certain, truly certain, that this is your reality? Seems to me it could just as easily be your mind's last desperate clutch at sanity, the only way you've got to escape from that worst-memories loop the dementors keep you in. Only if you're that delusional, to mistake a dream for reality, I'd say you're mad already, or getting close to it. In which case, I'd be doing you a favor if I did _this_ —"

His wand whisked sideways once.

Lucius had no time to raise his own wand before his world spun, wobbled, then steadied into a new pattern.

Darkness surrounded him where he lay, together with a bone-deep chill and an indescribable, unmistakable stench. Sobs, shrieks, ravings, curses rose around him, a din that was never silent, day or night. Turning onto his side, he curled into himself. "A dream," he whispered, "this is only a dream…"

But waking, he knew from bitter experience, was many painful hours away.

Groaning, he covered his ears with his hands, but that only magnified the voices inside his head, as the cold surrounding him grew more intense.

"— _Bachle Analysis on a hunch. Came back positive. Whoever he was, he's a werewolf."_

" _Werewolf? Really, now." The wizard sounded positively amused by this. "Bit of a shame, that. The kid'll probably be turned at the next full moon, assuming he survives it. Still, we can't spare anyone to track him down at this point, not with so many Death Eaters to bring in…"_

* * *

Narcissa blinked awake, confused. The room was the wrong shape and size to be her bedroom (either of them), and her neck and shoulders ached terribly.

"Sleeping dangerously, Cissy?" inquired a voice from behind her.

Whirling around, Narcissa stared. "How did you get in here?" she demanded.

"New invention." Her cousin Sirius waved a hand towards the entrance to her sitting room in Malfoy Manor without moving from his lounging position on the sofa against one wall. "It's called a door. I really think it's going to catch on."

"That is not what I meant." Narcissa took a deep breath, trying to steady her nerves. "You are _dead_ , Sirius."

"You know, you're the second person tonight to tell me that. One more person says so, I'm going to start to get worried." Sirius grinned at the look on Narcissa's face. "Don't fuss, Cissy. You're dreaming, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to drop in and say hi. It's been a while. How've you been? You and Lucius, and your kid, what's his name. I never could remember it." He chuckled reminiscently. "Merlin's cot, that was funny, that one time—oh, you weren't there. Never mind."

"Astounding." Narcissa sat back in her chair, regarding her cousin in wonder. "Even death hasn't changed you."

"Why should it?" Sirius shrugged. "Dying's easy. Living, now, living is hard. Especially living through Azkaban. But I had my secret weapons." His smile turned momentarily wicked before vanishing entirely as he sat up, fixing her gaze with his. "Looks like you did too, Cissy. You really shouldn't fall asleep with your secrets on display."

"What are you talking about?" Narcissa drew herself up indignantly, ignoring the stir of fear behind her ribs. "What secrets? What do you think I have ever done that the whole world may not know?"

"The whole world's one thing. Lucius is another." Sirius glanced in the direction of the bedrooms. "And I think he might have a few questions if he saw this."

He lifted his right hand. Between two fingers he held a small Muggle-style photograph.

Narcissa tightened her hands around the arms of her chair as the room swung dizzily around her. "That is mine," she said in a voice which sounded nothing like her own. "Give it back to me."

"Gladly." Sirius wafted it into the air with his wand and floated it across the distance between them into her lap. "But you need to be a little more careful, Cissy. I don't think you got this far by taking stupid chances. Fortunately for you, the only person who came along this time is yours truly, but inquiring cousins want to know. Who is that mysterious girl, anyway, and what's a pair of eyes an awful lot like yours doing in that strong little face with all that dark hair?" His voice gentled. "I do have to say, she looks like a sweetheart. What is she, eight? Nine?"

"She will be nine next week." Narcissa looked once more at the photograph, her usual rush of longing for its original welling up in her heart, before she slid it safely away in one of her desk drawers and locked it with the charm which would respond only to her. "And you are right about one thing. She is very sweet indeed." Despite herself, she smiled. "I have heard it said that children who are conceived as a result of love potions, rather than natural love and desire between their parents, are born unable to love anyone, even themselves. If the reverse is also true, perhaps it explains a few things about my Cassandra."

"Cassandra." Sirius nodded slowly. "Invoking a bit of mythology, are you? She's true, but you're hoping no one ever believes it. And if she's nine next week…" He paused, tapping his fingers against the back of his other hand. "That's what I thought. Nine years plus nine months back from right now puts us round about a very particular Halloween." He looked up at her, his eyes neither condemning nor mocking but understanding, even sympathetic. "You were scared, weren't you? Scared right out of your mind, because nothing in the way we grew up ever prepared you for the possibility that your side of things might lose."

"It cut the ground from under my feet." Narcissa shut her eyes, letting her mind rove back through the years to the breathless terror of those days and nights. "The world was falling to pieces around me, and I was not sure whether I more feared the thought that I might myself be arrested or that Lucius might be. Dementors would have been terrible enough, but the gloating pity of my peers might well have been worse. In either case, I was prepared." Without opening her eyes, she cupped her hand by her side, as if to hold a vial. "Three doses. One for each of us. It is a woman's work, after all, to defend her family's honor."

"We can argue that one another time," said Sirius after a pause of several seconds. "Especially since you never got that far. But now I have to ask. Why didn't you?"

"Because I dreamed, one night, that I had." Opening her eyes, Narcissa looked levelly at her cousin. "That Lucius had been discovered in possession of Death Eater paraphernalia, that he had been arrested and removed from the house before I ever had a chance to come near him, and that Draco on the very same night had vanished, spirited away from his nursery by a person or persons unknown. What else, I thought in my dream, was left to me but death? And so I took the poison, and lay down on my bed, and closed my eyes. Only to open them again not in the next world but in this one, although in a place completely strange to me, and under a torrent of abuse from the furious young wizard who had brewed the proper antidote in time to save me."

"Oh, really?" Sirius propped his feet on the end of the couch, grinning. "This I have to hear."

"He wanted to know what right I thought I had to take my own life, when so many lives more valuable than mine had been lost already. What right I had to add to the death toll from this war for no better reason than cowardice. And when I countered with the tale of my losses, he _laughed_ at me." A bit of the fiery fury she had felt at the time resonated through Narcissa, but she had come over the years to see the humor in the situation as well, dark as it might be. "He said that if I had only bothered to wait a few hours, I would have learned that my son was safe and well, and that if I had any mind worth mentioning, I would have seen years ago that Lucius was not worth my time. And thus began the first of many spectacular quarrels between us."

"Which turned into something else, if that photo's any indication." Sirius frowned. "But no, you're talking about dreams here. How'd it happen in reality?"

"The reality grew from the dreams." Narcissa massaged the corner of her forehead wearily. "I spent my days half-awake at best, drifting about the house, as Lucius did his best to convince the fools at the Ministry that he had been an unwilling participant in everything, or had never been in the places they mentioned at all. To which I often testified, perjuring myself hopelessly in the process, and receiving from my husband not so much as a word of thanks." She shook her head. "Which brought me to the understanding that my unwilling dream-host was far more right than I wanted him to be. And so, one night, I dressed in Muggle clothing and sought out the house where my dreams had him living, hoping to find it empty, or him otherwise occupied."

"But it wasn't, and he wasn't." Sirius held up a hand to stop her before she could continue. "That's all I need to know, Cissy, trust me. Even that much is causing mental scarring already. You came, you saw, you conquered each other, and then?"

"And then, I left." Narcissa shrugged one shoulder. "I returned here, and we have treated one another ever since with the politeness proper to our social standings. In this world. In the dreams…" She sighed, letting her longing show, as she had so seldom been able to do. "In the dreams, we continued to learn about one another. To argue about all those things which our backgrounds and experiences meant we saw differently. But more and more, the arguments turned playful. Sometimes they led us into further intimacy, and at other times to simple childish silliness. I can still remember the first time I heard him truly laugh. He was as surprised by it as I was." Shyly, she glanced over at her cousin. "It was on that night that I told him my news."

"In the dreams, you told him. And he was happy to hear it, and you've lasted this long." Sirius waited for her affirming nod before going on. "Does he know it happened here too?"

"He does not." Narcissa shut her eyes wearily. "Only my sister knows. My sister, and her husband, and her husband's cousins, who have acted as my daughter's foster parents since her birth. And yes, before you ask, they are Muggles." Into the darkness, she smiled. "What better way to ensure Lucius will never find her?"

"So you and 'Dromeda made it up. I'd always hoped you could." The springs of the sofa squeaked as Sirius changed position. "You know your son's been carrying on with her daughter. So to speak."

"Know?" Narcissa chuckled. "I _arranged_ it, Sirius, as soon as I realized where Draco's inclinations lay. The petty scufflings for power among the children who should have been his peers amused him, but he showed no desire to join in. Instead he spent his time flying, or digging in a corner of the gardens, or trying out the musical instrument which was his first purchase with his own pocket money." She opened her eyes to look over at her cousin, who was shooting colored smoke rings from his wand at the ceiling. "That, most of all, told me the true desires of his heart, for it took him well over a month to be able to coax anything other than horrible squawks from that little pipe, but he persevered until he had it mastered."

"I'd tend to agree that says Badger more than Snake." Sirius fired a black arrow through a golden-yellow heart. "And if you'd been back in touch with 'Dromeda, you'd have known where her Dora had been Sorted. So you…what? Left the unexpurgated family tree lying around?"

"I did, and complained once or twice within Draco's hearing about such an unworthy recipient of our great-grandfather's Metamorphmagic as my sister's daughter Nymphadora. Which, as I suspected, piqued Draco's interest, and he enlisted Dobby's help to send her one of the more delightful notes I have ever been privileged to read." Narcissa smiled. "'Dear Cousin Nymphadora, my mother says you can make your hair change colors. I tried to make my hair change colors and it only worked a very little bit. Can you teach me how to make it work more than a very little bit? Please write back. Your cousin, Draco.'"

Sirius laughed aloud, swirling his wand to dissipate the smoke. "Merlin's bootlaces, that sounds just like him. What was he, six?"

"I believe so. And Nymphadora was a third year, which meant that they were indeed able to meet, during one of her Hogsmeade days. She intrigued him, he charmed her, and they have been corresponding regularly, and meeting as often as they have the chance, ever since. Which relieves me on several levels, because not only does it mean my son has someone in his life who encourages his best tendencies rather than his worst, but…"

"But?" Sirius prompted when Narcissa sat silent for several seconds.

"You know my husband, Sirius." Narcissa turned her wedding ring on her finger. "Both as a human being, and as a product of the world we were all three raised in. What would he do if he discovered I had borne another man's child? Especially _that_ man?"

"I know what he'd _want_ to do, and Lucius was never noted for curbing his impulses, not when he thought he could get away with it." Sirius scowled. "Why did you marry him, Cissy? Because they told you they ought to?"

"No, I was in love with him, at first. Or rather, I was in love with the position I would gain by wedding him, and with the glamorous image of him. The ice-lord, cold and remote, but still with a human heart, which could be reached and warmed by my love." Narcissa let her hands fall into her lap. "I know better now. Lucius is capable of love, certainly, but it is all given to colder things than he is himself. To the furtherance of his family line, to his personal ambition and pride, and to the Master he has chosen to serve. So I stay here to protect my children, each in their own way, and do my truest living in my dreams."

"Don't we all." Sirius smiled, his eyes far away. "Where are you tonight, in your dreams?"

"At the seaside. Cassandra loves the sea." The memories rose up soft and warm in Narcissa's mind, making her ache with longing, and she closed her eyes once more to see them clearly. "Her father rented a boat for us yesterday, as a surprise, and we sailed out along the coastline and talked about the mysterious world beneath the waves. Cassie wants to learn about the technology that Muggles use to study the depths of the oceans, then improve upon it with magic, so that she can become the greatest oceanographer either world has ever known, and learn every secret the seas have to hide."

"I hope she does." The sofa squeaked again, emitting the sound it made when its occupant stood up. "And I hope her mother gets what she wants too."

"I will." Narcissa yawned. "As soon as I fall asleep." She laughed sleepily. "Though how can I, when I am already dreaming?"

"Try this," her cousin's voice suggested, and the soft rush of air that meant an expertly cast spell washed over her.

With a little sigh of contentment, Narcissa Malfoy let go of herself, reaching eagerly towards the world where she bore neither of those names any longer, and never stopped to wonder how she could have been bespelled into her beloved dreams by the semblance of one who was dead.

* * *

In a wood-paneled bedroom overlooking green lawns, a broad bed dipped once, then settled. Its human occupant made a small noise of confusion, reached out a hand, and grunted in satisfaction as his fingers encountered fur. "Night, 'Rion," he muttered, subsiding back into sleep.

Thirty silent seconds passed.

"Good night, kid," a voice whispered into the darkness. "See you on the other side."

Then all was quiet at Malfoy Manor once more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As is my usual style, answering questions and raising more at the same time. Hope you're enjoying! Next chapter is almost undoubtedly the train ride to Hogwarts, so hang in there and we'll see what we shall see!
> 
> If you're wondering, the two Aurors about whom Lucius is dreaming in the middle of the chapter are indeed Frank and Alice Longbottom, and their fate in the alterworld is related to that night. More about them next time as well!


	15. Of Ifs and Ands

"You know, my alter ego was really rude to yours, the first day they met over in the gray world," said Mal to Henry as they sorted through the enormous pile of clean laundry in the center of the girls' bed. "It was your birthday, and he never got you a present."

"How was he supposed to know it was my birthday?" Henry rolled together a pair of his socks and tossed them into his cauldron, where they would help to cushion his potion-brewing kit on its journeys from Creedsdale to Pittsburgh via car, from Pittsburgh to London via airplane, and from London to Hogwarts via train. "I never said so."

"I'd certainly hope I know when my own cousin's birthday is." Mal sniffed, sticking his nose in the air. "He remembered enough to tell Dora, and _she_ sent something, but he never did, and I feel stupid about that."

"If you want to send him anything, send him a backpack." Two pairs of underpants joined the socks in Henry's cauldron. "He's got all his books and his Muggle clothes to get to Hogwarts, and nothing to carry them in."

"Right, because his trunk's already there, waiting for him." Mal got up to dump an armful of his own clothing into his cauldron. "I don't know why we don't all do it that way. Unless it's supposed to show how well we can keep ourselves from being noticed, getting these huge trunks through King's Cross and into platform nine and three-quarters without every Muggle for miles around realizing something's up." He straightened to gaze out the window. "Ever wonder what it would've been like if the parents had decided we weren't going back at all?" he asked quietly.

"We'd still be getting ready to go to a new school." Henry shook out a T-shirt and folded it to add to his pile. "It'd just be the Pittsburgh campus of Adastra Academy of Magic, instead of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Be nice to keep living at home, though. A lot of kids aren't close enough to any of the satellite campuses to do that, so they either have to homeschool or find host families." He glanced around the room. "They might have asked us to become a host family, and we'd have to find some reason why we couldn't convert the Doghouse into an extra bedroom…"

Mal snickered. "I can just see that letter. 'Sure, we'd love to put up some students in that basement bedroom, if you don't mind them getting mauled the first full moon they're here.' But since we're all going now, that won't be a problem. Aunt Amy's hosting a couple students in her apartment, isn't she?"

"She was going to, before Professor McGonagall came by, but since she'll be staying here to take care of River and Firefly while we're gone, she figured why not volunteer to host as many kids as the house can hold?" Henry motioned a line down the center of the girls' full-size bed. "Split this in half and bunk it like ours, do the same thing over in Mom and Dad's room, tuck a couple beds in Dad's writing room downstairs and a couple more in the Doghouse…"

"By my count, that's twelve." Mal frowned, looking around their room. "You think Aunt Amy can handle twelve kids all by herself?"

"You think she can't?" Henry picked up his pile of shirts and crossed the room to set them on his bed. "She works with goblins every day."

"True point." Mal packed socks and underwear tightly around his potions kit, giving the trunk an experimental shake to see if anything rattled. "Plus, if she's hosting that many, I bet they'll send over a brownie or two to help keep up with the housework. This place'll probably be cleaner than it's ever been when we get back next summer."

"Right." Henry swung himself onto his bed. "When we get back."

"What's wrong?" Mal looked up from his packing. "You sound kind of funny."

"You started it." Dropping the stack of shirts inside his trunk, Henry leaned on them to push the air out of them. "Asking what-if questions. Now I'm wondering what if one of us hadn't been able to go to Hogwarts, or hadn't wanted to go. Would Mom and Dad have let me, or Aunt Gigi and Uncle John have let you, stay here with Aunt Amy and attend Adastra while everybody else went off to Hogwarts?"

Closing the lid of his trunk, Mal sat down on it. "You're scared somebody's going to figure us out, aren't you?" he asked. "That somebody's going to spot one of us, or one of our dads, or even Aunt Thea or Pearl, and work out who we used to be."

"Aren't you?" Henry challenged. "It won't be so bad for you, not after we get Sorted. They'd never think somebody who started out like you could end up as a Hufflepuff. But they'll all be expecting me to turn out a Gryffindor, and that's most likely what I'm going to be. Add that to the eyes, the scar, the birthday, and we're all but caught already…"

"Borrowing trouble much?" said Jeanie from the doorway, making both boys jump. "You're being stupid, Henry. Who's going to know your birthday unless you tell them, or unless they're already close enough to us that we could trust them anyway? The same goes for your eyes. Only somebody that knew your birth mum pretty well would spot those, especially with how you look now. And the scar's all but impossible to see even from here, and I _know_ you have it." She crossed her arms and fixed him with a firm stare. "So you can just stop it right now. You too," she added in Mal's direction. "Though you probably weren't as bad."

"No, but I'm about to be." Mal got to his feet, regarding his sister curiously. "What's your alter ego's name, Jeanie? You've never told us, and Mom only ever calls you 'Neenie' when she tells that story."

"Because you know perfectly well I think we should leave the past in the past. I've never even admitted I _have_ those stupid dreams the way you do." Jeanie came into the room and began to sort her own clothing out of the heap on the bed. "And the more we think and talk about the dreams, the more likely it is we'll make some ridiculous mistake like calling each other by the wrong name, and then we _will_ get found out. Or we could start off the magic again like you did on Henry's birthday and get our souls pulled out of our bodies, which did _not_ sound like fun, thank you very much. So I'm not going to tell you anything."

"Oh, come on." Henry scooted to the edge of his bed, letting his feet dangle. "Give us a hint at least."

"How about just the first letter?" Mal coaxed. "If we promise not to go crazy with it?"

Jeanie kept working for a few moments, her head down. "You promise?" she asked at last. "No running up to me on the train or shouting at me across the platform or anything like that?"

"We'll be total strangers." Mal started to hold up his left hand, then quickly switched to his right, forcing Henry to stifle a snigger in his sleeve. "I'll even be snotty to you, if you like. Don't think Henry could get away with it, here or there."

"Depends on how know-it-all you're going to be over in the gray world." Henry leaned back against his hands. "Have you memorized our textbooks yet?"

"Being as prepared as possible for my first year of formal magical education is not a bad thing," said Jeanie primly, but her lips were twitching as she turned to face her brother and cousin. "All right, but only one letter. And only because you promised." She swallowed, as though preparing for some small ordeal, like a nasty-tasting dose of potion or a shot at the doctor's office. "You know the first two initials I have here," she said at last. "Switch them around, and they're the first two I have there."

Without giving either boy a chance to reply, she hurried out of the room.

"Jeanie Hope Reynolds." Mal drew his hawthorn wand from his pocket and scribed 'JH' on the air, then twirled the wand twice, making the letters change positions. "So she's HJ…something."

"Hope it doesn't start with a P." Henry slid down from his bunk and went back to the pile of laundry for another load. "The house-elves'll mix up our things all the time if it does. Unless your dad's able to talk her around to Ravenclaw, and that carries across the worlds."

"Here's hoping." Mal flipped back the lid of his trunk again. "I think there'd be murder done at some point if you and she and Boom Boom Weasley all ended up in the same House."

Henry paused in the middle of folding another shirt. "Do you think any of the parents are going to ask how he got that nickname?" he asked thoughtfully. "Ours or his?"

"We'll tell them it's because he roots for the Cannons." Mal shrugged. "And so long as the twins keep their mouths shut and the repairs hold up, no one ever has to know anything else."

* * *

_Was it really only yesterday I was a quarter of the world away from here?_

Jeanie stood at the window of the room she and Pearl were sharing at the Leaky Cauldron, gazing out over Diagon Alley. The Blakes and Reynolds had arrived in London the previous evening and come directly here, where judicious doses of her Aunt Thea's potions had combined with the natural weariness induced by twelve hours of travel to quickly realign eight body clocks in deep and dreamless sleep. Tomorrow, King's Cross Station beckoned, and after that…

_After that, nothing will ever be the same again._

_For either of us._

Taking a step back, Jeanie looked at her reflection in the window glass. Her reflection looked back gravely. For an instant, she felt a wild temptation to smash the window and the image in it, to end this impossible duality of worlds, of lives. Being one person, with one name, one family, one destiny, could only be for her own good—

_But would it just be for me, or would it happen to everybody?_ She glanced over her shoulder to where Pearl still lay sleeping. _I know how unhappy they all are in their other lives, in their gray world, and that's starting to change, but it isn't there yet. I can't do that to them._

_Besides, the only way I'd never have to choose is if I could be Jeanie for always and always, and I don't think it works like that._

With a sigh, she picked up her hairbrush from its place on the bureau and began to work it through her hair. From the time they'd realized why she often awakened from her dreams frightened and confused, her dad and mom had been preparing her as gently as possible for the inevitable dual life of a Muggleborn witch. As much as her alter ego loved her parents, and they loved her, she would soon begin to have experiences that a pair of Muggle dentists simply could not comprehend—

"No, that's not fair." Jeanie sat down in the rather squashy chair by the window. "Maybe they don't have magic of their own, but that doesn't mean they can't understand what it's like. And the difference between us certainly doesn't mean I'll stop loving them, or going home to them, or being their daughter." She hissed in pain as the brush encountered a tricky knot, and set the brush aside to untangle the knot with her fingers. "But I'm still magical, and they're still Muggles. There are some things they'll never be able to see or do with me. Some questions I won't be able to ask them." Her fingers stilled within her hair. "I wish there were some way for everyone to be happy…"

She paused, then laughed under her breath. "Look at me! Like I'm waiting for an answer to come down out of the sky! It's like Dad always says. If you want it with your heart, you need to put your head and your hands to work on it. And right now, that means getting dressed." Finishing with the stubborn knot, she picked up the brush again and continued the work of taming her hair. "Muggle clothes still, not magical, for just this one last day."

Her voice roused Pearl, who blinked at her sleepily for a few moments, then clambered out of bed with a yawn, searching out her day clothes and hanging her night things on the bed to air. "Do you think we'll see any of our friends today?" the younger girl asked, pulling on her socks. "Doing any last-minute shopping, or coming to stay the night so they don't have as far to go in the morning?"

"Maybe." Jeanie stifled a yawn of her own behind her hand. "But one of your friends doesn't have to go anywhere, does she? She's already at Hogwarts, or she will be as soon as the professors come back from wherever they spend their summer vacations. And if you two play one single trick on me this year, I'm dumping you in the Forest for the centaurs or the wise wolves to take care of," she added fiercely. "And I'll lie my face off to Aunt Thea and Cousin Cecy about it, too!"

"Really?" Pearl perked up, sitting down to tie her shoes. "That sounds like fun! We could play Mowgli, or Tarzan, or Demigoddess Heroines, all day and all night too, and never have to do chores or homework or anything!"

Jeanie sighed. "Just when you think you've got a good threat, it backfires on you," she said to the mirror.

"It's not my fault you don't know what she likes," the mirror retorted. "You're the one who lives with her."

"True enough." Jeanie went to the door and opened it.

Past her feet and into the room shot a streak of black-and-white fur, emitting a low noise somewhere between a hiss and a growl, which rose and fell as the creature wearing the fur scrambled around the room, trying to find an exit. Pearl shrieked and jumped onto the chair, and Jeanie snatched her vinewood wand out of her pocket. _Let me see if I can do this right…_

" _Wingardium leviosa_ ," she said clearly, executing a careful swish and flick, its final motion aimed directly at the animal.

With a startled yowl, a skinny black cat with a jagged streak of white along her side rose into the air, her paws flailing furiously. Pearl giggled at the sight and climbed down again, and the round-faced boy now standing in the doorway of the room sighed in relief. "Thanks, Jeanie," he said, nodding to her. "I should have known you'd know what to do."

"You're welcome, Captain." Jeanie sketched a curtsey to another of the friends she and her brother and cousins had made on their family's expeditions to England over the years, this one a bit more recent than the Weasley siblings, though Jeanie was fairly sure their parents had known each other back in the time before. "Happy day before Hogwarts."

"Thanks, you too. Hi, Pearl." Neville Longbottom advanced into the girls' room, looking doubtfully at his pet, who was now grumbling and muttering to herself as she writhed in the grip of Jeanie's levitation spell. "Would you get the door? If Jeanie puts Trixie down with it open, she'll only run away again."

"Sure." Pearl pattered over to the door and closed it firmly. "Did you come to Diagon Alley to get something for Hogwarts? We're all going, you know, even me, because Uncle John's going to be the assistant Defense professor and Mom's going to be their Healer on call, and Dad and Aunt Gigi didn't want to stay behind by themselves. So I get to come too, and live in their quarters, like Cassie does in her mom and dad's."

"That's great, Pearl." Neville nodded to his pet. "We're here because of Trixie. She's hard to find when she runs away and hides even at home, and Mum said I'd better have some way to keep track of her before I take her anywhere as big and full of hiding places as Hogwarts. So Dad found this little shop that sells talismans with locator spells, and we're going to get her fitted with a harness at the Magical Menagerie and attach the talisman to it. That way, I'll always know where she is."

"That's definitely important." Jeanie lowered the cat to the bed and ended the spell. Trixie hissed once at her before settling down to wash her fur back into place. "My parents decided it would be better for our cats to stay home, so we don't have any animals to take to Hogwarts yet, though Henry and Mal have been talking about getting an owl to share, and I might chip in too." She giggled a bit, imagining the owl's dilemma. "That poor bird. It'll never know which table to come to first! Where do you want to be Sorted, do you know yet?"

"Not really." Neville shrugged. "As long as it's not Slytherin, I'll have a friend anywhere I end up, so I'm not too worried."

Pearl made a face at Neville, coming to sit on the end of the bed. "Slytherin isn't all bad," she announced. "I want to be in Slytherin, and Cassie does too."

Trixie prowled down the bed to butt her head against Pearl's arm in approval.

"That's fine for you, Pearl, but you and Cassie won't be Hogwarts students for two more years." Neville moved cautiously to the side of the bed, then pounced, scooping up Trixie and tucking her against his side. She grumbled under her breath, but subsided into his grip sulkily. "I think I may want Hufflepuff, like Dad. But we'll see."

"We will," Jeanie agreed. "Do you think you can keep hold of Trixie while we have breakfast? If you can, you and I could go over to the Menagerie together and pick out something nice for her."

"I'll have a go, but she's in a nasty mood." Neville winced as he pried a set of claws out of his side.

"When isn't she in a nasty mood?" Pearl tapped a finger against Trixie's nose, and dodged the snapping teeth that resulted. "Come on, let's go find the grownups. They can probably help."

Downstairs, Mal and Henry greeted Neville with the nickname he'd earned via the role he had invariably taken during their endless games of Pirate Ship summer before last, while his parents looked up from their discussions with the adult Blakes and Reynolds to make the obligatory exclamations over how much Pearl and Jeanie had grown. Alice Longbottom conjured her son a temporary harness and lead for Trixie, allowing him to set her down on the floor beside him, and the little group, eleven strong (not counting the cat), settled in for breakfast.

"Why don't you come back to our place for dinner tonight?" said Frank over toast and marmalade. "I'll Floo Mum about it right now, and that'll give her an hour or two to fuss and fume about how I never give her any warning of these things before she starts cleaning furiously and bossing the house-elves around and generally having the time of her life."

"Such a good son, keeping his mother young." Gigi smiled sweetly at Frank. "If you're going to twist our arms about it, what can we do but accept?"

"I knew you'd see things my way." Frank grinned. "Shall we meet back here at six?"

* * *

"Hard to believe they're Hogwarts age already," said Alice that night after dinner, watching the children at the other end of the room, laughing and egging Trixie on as she stalked a magically animated wooden snake. "Seems like just yesterday I was clearing the first floor at Malfoy Manor after we'd arrested Lucius, and spotted possibly the least likely people in the world stepping out of the nursery." She nodded to John and Gigi. "And you said to me…"

"'We're not here,'" John quoted his younger self. "And you saw to it that officially, we weren't."

"So I did." Alice looked thoughtful. "Though I may have let a few things slip where Lucius could hear me. Just by accident, you understand, telling Frank what was going on, and of course naming no names. But I couldn't resist the thought of everybody's favorite pureblood hearing over and over in Azkaban what sort of people would be raising his little boy instead of him."

"Marvelous." Gigi chuckled, the sound low and satisfied. "Now if we could only show him how Mal's turned out. But that would involve his still being free, and I don't think any of us want that."

"When I think of what we'd have lost if we hadn't caught up with him when we did…" Frank shook his head in wonder. "Bastard was so confident of that hidey-hole under his drawing room floor that he kept written records of Muggle torture in there, chapter and verse on who'd done what, when and where. We got better than half the Marked Death Eaters off the streets on the strength of that alone. Crabbe, Goyle, Dolohov, Rookwood, Karkaroff, Macnair—"

"Macnair?" John interrupted. "Walden Macnair?"

"The very same." Alice raised an eyebrow at her friend. "Why?"

"I saw that name in the newspaper recently." John frowned. "Though I can't remember why."

"For the best of all possible reasons, as far as I'm concerned." Alice drew a finger across her throat. "He's dead. Died in his sleep about a month ago, in his cell in Azkaban. Systemic shock leading to heart failure, which is Healer-speak for death by dementor. No offense meant," she added to Thea.

"None taken." Thea intercepted Ryan's glass of firewhiskey on its way to his mouth and added a splash of it to her tea before handing it back. "I'm sure that's what you saw, isn't it, John?"

"It must have been." John leaned forward to take a petit four from the tray of after-dinner treats. "Funny, though. I could have sworn it was something else. Like his being missing."

"Losing your mind much, Moony?" Ryan downed his reduced drink and exhaled in pleasure. "Nobody goes missing from Azkaban. Nobody ever has, at any rate. And I doubt a two-a-Sickle Death Eater like Walden Macnair would be the first, not when he couldn't even…" He coughed, shaking his head. "Gah. Firewhiskey got me there. You were saying, Frank? Getting Death Eaters off the streets?"

"It was a mad and glorious time," Alice took over. "We barely saw Neville for a fortnight after Halloween, some of which was your fault," she said sternly to Ryan. "You couldn't have just Stunned Pettigrew instead of killing him? We had to do some awfully fast talking to convince Barty Crouch you and he _both_ hadn't been Death Eaters, even after we examined his wand and found he'd been about to throw a spell that would have blown the entire street to bits. It wasn't until Dumbledore passed your letter along and we were able to link the Fidelius on the Potters' place to him that Crouch conceded. And we could have done that a lot more easily if Pettigrew had still been alive."

"Wormtail knew too much." Ryan's hand contracted on his knee. "Our best chance of keeping the kids safe was to disappear from here and pop up in the States, make everyone think we'd been settled there for years and Henry was Thea's and mine by blood. But Wormy knew Thea hadn't really gone to America when she said she had, and he was one of the only people in the world who could have followed the logic we used for changing our names. And he would have, too. Bringing in The Boy Who Lived would have been his only way to salvage his chances with the Dork Lord." For an instant, something dark and feral flashed in his eyes. "I don't regret what I did. Do it again tomorrow if I had the chance. Sniveling little rat-bastard—"

"Not in front of the children," said Thea firmly, and Ryan sighed between his teeth but subsided. "And after that fortnight, what then?" she asked the Longbottoms. "I know there was some excitement of the less-than-pleasant variety, but we never got many details."

"Yet another reason to be grateful for Lucius Malfoy's mistakes." Alice picked up a madeleine and dipped it into her tea. "If it hadn't been for him, and the haul of Death Eaters we got from his records, we probably would have thought our ordinary protective charms were enough. And we would have been very, very wrong."

"We set an extra layer of spells around the house, inside the normal wards, just as a precaution." Frank gestured in the air in front of him, his hands sketching spheres within spheres, shields on top of shields. "And it was that final set of spells that tripped and woke us up just in time, the night four Death Eaters came sneaking in here." He looked across the room at his son, who was using his wand to coax the wooden snake to slither in patterns for Trixie to chase. "Otherwise we'd probably have had to choose. Apparate out and save ourselves, or hide Neville's cot and save him. I still have nightmares about it sometimes, what could have happened, what might have become of us…"

"Except that it didn't." Alice reached over to squeeze her husband's hand comfortingly. "We were awake and we were ready, and we got them all, and three of them stood their trial and went off to Azkaban. As for the fourth one…" She smiled sweetly, her eyes fixed on the little black cat with the white streak down her side, who was even now crouching to pounce on the fake snake. "She's not here."

"But she's not anywhere else either, now is she?" asked Gigi with a sly grin, as Ryan froze in the act of refilling his glass and stared incredulously at the cat.

John removed the bottle from Ryan's grasp before his glass could overflow. "Trixie," he said, nodding. "Very clever."

"Thank you." Frank sat back in his chair. "She was so certain of herself, so positive that her Master would reward her even for trying and failing to find him, and Azkaban wouldn't have had any real effect on her, not when she was already madder than a cage full of Fwoopers. Alice didn't have to do much talking to convince me a more roundabout form of justice was necessary here." He smiled. "And now, she's getting ready to accompany our son to Hogwarts."

"Well, that explains the meowing," muttered Ryan, and tossed off his glass of firewhiskey.

John and Thea both glanced speculatively at him, but neither made a comment. Gigi merely smiled, and the conversation moved on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If things are still confusing, they're meant to be, just a little. But I do promise that it will make sense when you finally see all the pieces. There are a few hints in this chapter, as it happens, along with the openly stated things that are going on. Like Trixie. I do hope you enjoy her, as she has caused much giggling among my group of idea-vetters.
> 
> Today is Fiction Friday, both here on the fanfic sites and on my blog, [Anne's Randomness](http://www.annebwalsh.com/blog). Obviously the chapter is my offering here, and on the blog I've been doing a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Most Incredible Thing". Please have a look, thanks as always for reading, and more as soon as I can manage it!


	16. The Journey to Platform Nine and Three-Quarters

Harry was up at five in the morning on 1 September, double-checking that he'd packed everything in the backpack Draco had sent him (which had, he suspected, been enchanted before it ever got to him, since both armfuls of books and all the Muggle clothing Professor McGonagall had sent him fit inside with room to spare), then pacing back and forth across his room out of sheer nerves. As he passed the window for probably the twentieth time, he stopped to have a look at Privet Drive.

The houses, shorn of any variations in color by the dim light of pre-dawn, sat in a primly identical row along the street, like a painted backdrop or magically copied properties for a children's play about Muggles. Harry had the unnerving feeling that in another moment he would see them start to collapse like balloons with the air being let out, or dissipate into nothingness as though they'd been hit by a Vanishing Charm.

_Or they'll go away between one blink and the next. Like waking up out of a dream._ He smiled a little as he imagined the plain white walls of his bedroom replaced in an instant with the comfortably shabby wallpaper of the Leaky Cauldron. _No more Privet Drive, no more Dursleys, just my family and my friends and Hogwarts…_

"But really, I'm doing all right." Harry went to his desk, taking one last sheet of paper out of the drawer and picking up the pen he'd be leaving behind in favor of quills and parchment scrolls. "Sleeping or waking, I'm going to Hogwarts. Friends shouldn't be too hard to find once I'm there. As for family…" He looked down at the backpack, and at the diagram of names he'd folded into fourths and tucked into one of its side pockets. "Well, we're working on that."

_I've met Mal already, and Dora, and I know Pearl and Mom and Uncle John all exist here too. Most likely I'll be seeing Jeanie sometime today, and I know Dad_ did _exist, but not if he's still alive, or if he's anybody I'd want to know on this side of things…_

Shoving those thoughts away, Harry set pen to paper. The best way not to worry about the dissonances between the two lives he lived, he'd found, was to imagine a life he didn't, the way things might have happened if he'd never dreamed of the alterworld at all. He couldn't be sure what it would really have been like, but he'd enjoyed inventing some of the events to please himself, like Hagrid tracking down the Dursleys to hand-deliver his Hogwarts letter, and cursing Dudley with a pig's tail while he was at it.

_The Journey from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters,_ he wrote, and patted the pocket of his backpack where his ticket for the Hogwarts Express rested. The Dursleys, in this fictional universe, would grudgingly give Harry a lift to King's Cross, under the impression that this platform did not exist, and that Harry would therefore be stranded in the train station with a trunk he could barely lift, a pocket full of wizard money, and a large snowy owl named Hedwig.

_But wizards have had an awful lot of practice at hiding things they don't want to be found._

After a moment to sketch a brick wall in his margin, its bricks on the verge of turning sideways to form an arch, Harry returned to writing. His own transportation to King's Cross would be arriving sometime around nine, if he'd overheard his aunt correctly on the telephone the week before, and he wanted to get as far as he could in his story before then.

_All right, so who does he see going through the barrier? Not Tonks, I don't think, she'd get a little too much attention from the Muggles unless she tamed her hair down, and then he probably wouldn't notice her in the first place…how about the Weasleys? There's a whole bunch of them, they all have red hair, and Percy's a prefect so he's got an owl…_

Nodding as the story took shape, Harry let his imagination fly free. What would really happen was yet to be seen, but in his stories, he could do whatever he wanted.

_Like Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia taking Dudley to London anyway, because he's got to have his pig's tail removed before he goes away to Smeltings!_

* * *

Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Harry glanced up at the sound, then scribbled one more sentence, a description of his fictional self's feelings as the Hogwarts Express pulled out of the station, and folded up the paper just in time to shove it into his backpack as the door of his bedroom opened.

"Here he is," said Uncle Vernon, stepping back from the door to allow two people into the room. One was Tonks, wearing her Ms. Nigellus face, and the other was a tall, bald, black man with a majestic look about him, one of his ears pierced with a gold hoop. "We've kept him indoors, as you suggested. I do trust there won't be any trouble about his staying at school over the Christmas and Easter holidays?"

"Not at all," boomed Tonks in the gravelly voice she'd used for this role before, though it was clearly new to the man, as he raised an amused eyebrow in her direction before gesturing to Harry to pick up his backpack. "We prefer to have them as long as possible at a stretch. Gives us more of a chance to get them used to our ways, if you know what I mean."

"Yes, well, you may find him a bit of a challenge." Uncle Vernon was having trouble keeping his smirk from breaking through his worried-relative-of-a-troubled-boy expression. "We've tried our hardest to keep him in line, but it doesn't seem to have been enough."

"We'll do the keeping in line from here on out," said the man, his voice deep and calm as he took Harry's elbow in a grip Harry suspected looked much tighter than it was. "You won't have to worry about a thing."

"That's for sure." Tonks leered at Harry, forcing him to cough into his hand rather than laugh outright at her antics. "Come on, boy, we've got a ways to go to get you to St. Brutus's on time, and it's not the sort of place you'd want to be late."

"Bye, Harvey!" called Dudley, leaning out the living room window and grinning all over his face as Tonks and the man escorted Harry down the front walk towards the dark green car with its uniformed driver. "See you next summer…maybe!"

The man glanced back towards Dudley, then down at Harry. "Harvey?" he asked, in tones too low to carry back to the house.

"She started it," said Harry promptly, indicating Tonks with a twitch of his elbow.

"Oh, sure, blame everything on me," grumbled Tonks, taking Harry's bag from him, then opening the door so that Harry could climb into the car. It was far nicer than any of Uncle Vernon's company cars, with a partition of tinted glass separating the front from the back, and the seat on which Harry found himself was approximately the length of a park bench, though much more comfortable.

_Probably the same kind of spell as on my pack._

He pulled his feet out of the way of that very item as Tonks tossed it negligently into the car, then climbed inside herself, her colleague just behind her. Peering past them to take one last look at number four, Privet Drive, Harry saw Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia standing together at the front door, with Dudley still filling the frame of the living room window. On a whim, he waved, and saw Aunt Petunia's hand rise for one half-hearted little motion, while Uncle Vernon snorted and Dudley made a face.

Then the earring-wearing wizard leaned forward and pulled the door shut, and Harry sat back as the car leapt into motion. Number four, Privet Drive, and its neighbors receded into the distance, and a strange certainty filled Harry's mind that he'd never see them again, that this leavetaking was for always, that he'd left the Dursleys and Little Whinging behind for good…

_Except I know I haven't. I'll be back here next summer. But that gives me ten Dursley-free months, and who knows what could happen?_ He grinned inwardly. _Maybe I'll make friends with the house-elves and they'll fix me up a little room at the castle where I can stay over the summers, and then I really never will have to go back!_

"Phew." Tonks exhaled a long breath as the car turned the first corner, letting her features slide back into their natural form. Her hair cycled through four or five colors before settling into its usual pink. "Wotcher, Harry. Glad to see you made it through. This is Kingsley Shacklebolt, my Auror mentor. Kingsley, Harry Potter."

"Pleased to meet you." Harry shook hands with Kingsley. "Thanks for coming to get me."

"Not at all." Kingsley smiled. "It makes a pleasant change from my everyday routine. Even chasing Dark wizards has its boring parts."

"Chasing Dark wizards is mostly boring parts," Tonks corrected. "Loads of gruntwork, sorting through tips that've come into the Ministry, researching spells and potions and family trees in moldy old scrolls and books. I get stuck with most of that because I'm the apprentice."

"Why else would I have saddled myself with you?" Kingsley chuckled deep in his throat, then frowned as the sound of chimes in a slightly dissonant chord filled the car. "Pardon me," he said, pulling what appeared to be an ordinary lighter out of his pocket. "I need to take this." With a flick of his wand, his section of the car was screened off with what looked like a thick blanket of smoke.

"Take this?" Harry asked Tonks.

"Portable Floo." Tonks mimed flicking open a lighter. "You remember how I firecalled Mal from my place? Well, technically it was Dobby I was talking to, and I put on my old man face and acted like I'd got through to the wrong grating." She sprouted a beard and mustache, dirty white to match her hair, and her voice turned wobbly and petulant. "Magnus? Magnus, is that you—oh, dragon's blood, not again! Wrong fire, beg pardon!"

Harry laughed, and Tonks took a seated bow as she restored her face once more. "It's how we make sure Uncle Lucius doesn't find out I'm corrupting his ickle Dwaco," she said. "But the Floo Network's only ever been able to connect to established fireplaces, which means if someone's not home, you're out of luck. With these new little portables, you can get a Floo connection to just about anywhere. Voice only, but miles better than nothing." She cast an envious glance at Kingsley's smoke screen. "Not that I rate one. They're brand-new and imported to boot, so they cost a bagful of Galleons and only high-ranking Ministry types get them. But by the time you leave Hogwarts, I bet you almost everybody'll have one."

"Cool." Harry looked out the window at the swiftly passing houses and buildings. Already they were further away from Privet Drive than he had ever been, except on his trip with Professor McGonagall to London. "Can I ask you something?"

"You just did." Tonks grinned, and reached over to ruffle Harry's hair at his look of disgust. "No, go on. What's on your mind?"

"I was just wondering about being an Animagus. Professor McGonagall showed me what she can do, and it looked amazing, but she said it was hard and it took a long time to learn." Harry pulled his wand out of his pocket, running a finger down its length. "Can't wizards turn things into other things, transfigure them? So if I wanted to be a dog for a while, couldn't I just get a friend to change me into one?"

"You could, but it's dangerous. Physically dangerous, first off." Tonks drew her own wand and conjured a mouse onto her palm. "I know that looked easy, but do you have any idea how hard I had to study to get it right?" she asked as the mouse sat up, its whiskers wiggling. "You can't just think of a mouse. You have to know, at least a little bit, what goes inside a mouse, or you'll get a pile of fur with nothing in it. Or the inside bits without the fur, which is worse. Now imagine that happening to you, and your very own personal inside bits."

Harry pressed a hand against his stomach, and Tonks nodded grimly. "Not pretty, is it? But even if the transfiguration goes off without a hitch, there's the problem of _thinking_." She swirled her wand the other way, making the mouse vanish. "Animals don't have the same sort of brains that people do, and if you're transfigured into an animal, you're transfigured all the way, brains and all. You might remember that you used to be a human for a while, but eventually your memories would get shoved out to make room for your animal instincts, and once they're gone, they're gone, even if you get turned back. That's one of the reasons becoming an Animagus is so hard, because you have to find the right spells to bring your human mind along for the ride."

"Oh." Harry considered this. "So then—"

With a little whoosh, Kingsley's smoke screen vanished, revealing the wizard with an annoyed expression on his face. He leaned forward and tapped the partition between the front and back seats. "Stop a moment, will you, David?" he requested the driver when the little window slid open. "Thanks. For once, urgent really did mean urgent," he said to Harry and Tonks, returning the lighter to his pocket. "I've got to get back to the Office. I'll leave you a note with more details, Tonks—come find me when you're finished here, all right?"

"All right." Tonks nodded to her mentor as the car slid to the side of the road and stopped. "Best of luck with whatever it is."

"Thanks again," Harry added as Kingsley opened the door and stepped out. "Why did we have to stop?" he asked Tonks once Kingsley had closed the door behind himself, taken two steps away from the car, and vanished in the turning-around motion which Harry now knew signaled an Apparition in progress (Henry's parents tended to rely more heavily on Muggle modes of transit, as was the American norm). "If he was just going to Apparate anyway?"

"Because when you Apparate somewhere, you get there moving the same speed and direction as you were in the place you left." Tonks mimed something heavy hitting a wall, as the car merged back into traffic. "Kid I knew in school tried Apparating off his broomstick while he was flying it the summer he turned seventeen. Last I heard, he's mostly learned how to walk again."

Harry grimaced. "Magic's not very safe, is it?"

"No more than anything else worth doing." Tonks shook her head a trifle impatiently. "Look, your wand's not about to jump up and bite you on the nose, not unless somebody's hit it with a pretty strong jinx, and even then it might not take. Wands don't like acting against their masters. But no, magic's not safe. If you wanted safe, you should've tossed that Hogwarts letter in the bin and gone to Muggle school like your relatives wanted, maybe trained up for a job at your uncle's business, sorting letters or something. How's that sound?" She grinned at Harry's gagging noises. "Exactly. But if you're sensible about it, you should be fine. Don't use random spells you found in some old book, don't tickle a sleeping dragon, don't tease a hippogriff—"

"What's a hippogriff?"

Stories about Tonks's days at Hogwarts, and the mishaps and triumphs pertaining thereto, filled the rest of the journey to London without trouble, and it wasn't until the car was stalled in heavy traffic three blocks from King's Cross that Harry remembered a question he'd wanted to ask Tonks. "Can I show you something?" he asked, and at her nod dug his picture frame out of his backpack. "The people here," he said, opening it to the central photograph, the one from his parents' wedding. "Do you know who any of them are? Besides my mum and dad, I mean, they're kind of obvious."

"Well, that's my cousin Sirius." Tonks grimaced, pointing to the dark-haired man who had thrown back his head to laugh. "My _late_ cousin Sirius, I should say, and not a moment too soon. Shame he turned out like he did, I remember him from when I was a kid, and he was brilliant. He used to come visit Mum, tell her stories about the crazy things he and his friends had done lately, and he'd always bring me something fun. Come to think, this chap came with him a couple times." Her finger moved over one place, to the image of the sandy-haired, ruefully smiling wizard Harry knew only as 'John Reynolds'. "What was his name? Something mythological, because I remember being glad it wasn't just my family that did that to their kids…"

Harry bit back his frustration and waited, until finally Tonks nodded. "Remus," she said, tapping her finger against the photograph, the newly-identified wizard dodging aside from the impact point. "His name was Remus. Can't recall the surname, but how many of those can there be? Especially in the same year as your dad and Sirius Black, and Gryffindors all three. Maybe one of these days you should look him up, see whatever happened to him."

"Maybe I should." Harry didn't bother suppressing his grin as he tucked the picture frame away again and zipped his backpack tightly shut, since the car was just now pulling up in front of King's Cross. He climbed quickly out and slung his backpack on while Tonks said a few quiet words to the driver. Then, as the car pulled away, witch and wizard entered the bustling Muggle train station together, following the signs which pointed them towards platforms nine and ten.

"Going to be all right?" Tonks asked as they threaded between groups of business-suited men and women, boisterously shouting children, bewildered-looking tourists.

"I think so," said Harry, though in truth he felt rather like he'd swallowed a whole, still-wriggling Chocolate Frog. Coming here in the alterworld, with his cousins, his friends, even his parents and little sister all preparing to embark on the Hogwarts Express together, was very different from standing in front of the barrier between platforms nine and ten alone except for one pink-haired witch, whom he'd met for the first time in his waking life just over a month ago.

"Hey." Tonks's voice was gentle, and Harry looked over at her. She was smiling a little, holding out her hand, and awkwardly he put his own into it. Her fingers closed around his and squeezed reassuringly. "You'll do fine. Deep breaths, head high, and never let them see you sweat."

"Can I let them see me be sick?" Harry muttered, and Tonks groaned once and swatted him lightly on the back of the head, before the sound of voices made her glance over her shoulder.

"Here comes somebody you might like," she said, nodding towards a small group of people advancing purposefully towards the barrier between platforms. "Whole bunch of somebodies, actually. I'd better get going, Kingsley doesn't say things like 'urgent' for no reason. Take care, Harry, and don't forget to write."

"I won't." Harry squeezed Tonks's hand once more in farewell, then stepped away from the barrier as she faded into a nearby crowd of Muggles, clearing the way for the small ginger army which had just arrived there. To his great satisfaction, hanging back from his mother and siblings as though reluctant to pass through the barrier was a boy about Harry's own age, as tall, gangly, and freckled as his alterworld counterpart, whom Pearl had discovered being picked on by his twin brothers outside the family's orchard on a snowy afternoon three and a half years ago, and had summoned her own brother and their cousins to his aid.

_And he and Henry have been friends ever since, though it's mostly been through letters up until now…_

The red-haired twins had vanished through the barrier now, their younger brother on their heels. Their mother nodded once before following, her daughter at her side. Harry glanced to right and left, making sure no Muggles were watching, and took a deep breath before stepping into the seemingly solid wall himself.

One instant of darkness surrounded him, and then he was through, looking up at the sign which hung overhead, declaring to all the world that they had arrived on _Platform Nine and Three-Quarters._ Beyond the crowd thronging the platform, about half of them wearing robes, the rest dressed in Muggle clothing, he could see the scarlet engine of the Hogwarts Express, steaming as the train prepared for its journey, and the long string of carriages which would convey the students. Owls hooted, cats yowled, trunks thumped stairs as they were hoisted aboard, and over it all rose the chatter of a happy, excited crowd of people, friends greeting one another after a summer apart, parents bidding their children a fond farewell.

Exhaling a long breath of relief, Harry hooked his thumbs into the straps of his backpack, easing its weight on his shoulders. "I made it," he murmured to himself. "I really made it."

"Excuse me," said a voice beside him. He jumped, then turned to face the speaker. The little girl with the mane of red hair (whose name, he reminded himself, he wasn't yet supposed to know, though his acquaintance with Tonks would make an adequate excuse should he slip) was looking him over dubiously, her big brown eyes resting momentarily on his backpack before returning to his face. "Do you need help getting your trunk past the barrier?" she asked.

"What—oh, no, but thank you." Harry shook his head, realizing how strange he must look to a girl who'd seen her brothers preparing for their own journeys to Hogwarts most of her life. "My trunk's already at Hogwarts, waiting for me. I live with my aunt and uncle and they don't like magic very much, so it wouldn't have been safe for me to have it at home."

The girl's eyes widened. "Are they…" She glanced around before speaking the word in a breathless undertone. " _Muggles?_ "

"Yes, they are. But not all Muggles are bad," Harry added, which cut off her horrified reaction and replaced it with a confused look. "Really, they're not. I have—" Quickly, he censored his mention of Gigi Reynolds, inserting instead the only item which could truly be said to apply to Harry Potter rather than Henry Blake. "—a teacher who's a Muggle, and she gave me a lot of good advice, helped me get my Hogwarts letter and everything."

"Really?" The girl seemed awed by this. "I always thought Muggles were afraid of magic."

"Some of them probably would be, but most of them just don't know it exists. And some of the ones who do know like to hear about it, learn about it, even though they can't do anything with it themselves." Harry shrugged. "My mum's parents were like that, from what I hear. I never met them, though, they died before I was born."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Did your parents die too? Is that why—" The girl flushed and shut her mouth tight. "I'm sorry," she said again, her words barely distinguishable as she stared at the ground. "Mum's always telling me I ask too many questions."

"No, it's all right." Harry stepped closer, waiting until the girl looked up at him again before he smiled. "My aunt always says, if you don't ask, you'll never find out." Inwardly he grinned at the ambiguity of the familial title. "Are you going to Hogwarts this year too?"

"I'm too young." The girl glared at the train as though it were personally responsible for this. "My brother Ron's going, though. And Fred and George and Percy were already there. Bill and Charlie are older, they've left. Oh, and I never said who I am!" She giggled a little, and held out her hand. "I'm Ginny, Ginny Weasley."

Harry met the hand with his own. "Harry Potter," he said, and realized an instant too late that this had been a mistake, as Ginny's eyes went even wider than before. "Don't yell," he hissed at her, and glanced around, spotting a tiny niche in the wall behind them. "Come on, in here."

Overriding her half-voiced protest, he pulled her into the nook and put his free finger to his lips. She gulped once, then nodded, and Harry released her hand, letting out a breath of relief. "Thanks," he said. "Sorry to drag you like that, but I didn't want you shouting my name across the entire platform."

"Why not?" Ginny had her hands planted on the wall behind her, and hadn't taken her eyes off Harry since he'd said his name. "I mean, if you really are—"

"I really am." Harry lifted his fringe to reveal the lightning-bolt scar, and grimaced at the worshipful expression which came into Ginny's face. "But it isn't like that, all right? I was a baby on the night I'm famous for. I don't even remember what happened. And really, I don't want to be famous. I'd rather be just plain me." Irked by the incomprehension he could see in Ginny's eyes, he tried again. "Look, do you like it when people stare at you? I bet your brothers have done that to annoy you before. Sitting there and staring at you, or maybe whispering and laughing with each other, and you know, you just _know_ , they're talking about you."

Ginny nodded. "Is that—" she whispered, then coughed once and tried again. "Is that what it's like for you? People staring at you, and talking about you, and you don't like it?"

"Yeah." Harry glanced up at the clock hanging over the platform. He had a few minutes still until the train left at eleven. "So you know what I could really use?" he suggested. "I could really use a friend. Somebody I could write letters to, who'd write me back. Somebody who knows a lot about the wizarding world. And somebody who likes me just because I'm me, not because I'm famous." He looked back at Ginny and smiled, making sure to meet her eyes. "Do you think you could?"

"I can try." Ginny tried to return the smile, but her lips wobbled. "Except you _are_ famous, and how am I supposed to forget that?" she burst out. "You're a _hero_ , all my _life_ I've heard stories about you—"

"So let's pretend I'm somebody else." The idea burst into Harry's mind whole and complete, and he let the grin it brought in its wake spread naturally across his face. "Let's pretend I'm not Harry Potter at all. My name's Henry, and I just moved here from America, so that's why I don't know very much about the wizarding world. Could you write letters to Henry, and tell him all the little things he doesn't know, and be his friend? Please?"

"I—think so." Ginny laughed, a breathy, tremulous sound, but true. "Yes. I can. But how is the owl going to know you're Henry?"

"That's easy. I'll write to you first, and you can just ask the owl to return. Maybe I'll even do that tonight, if I'm not too tired, but tomorrow at the latest. And then I'll borrow somebody's owl, or—does Hogwarts keep owls?" It was Harry's turn to laugh this time. "Yes, of course they do. How else would all those letters get out?"

Ginny's smile returned, stronger this time. "They do, and all the students are allowed to use them, if they don't have an owl of their own," she confirmed. "The Owlery's one of the highest towers in the castle. The Astronomy Tower's higher, and the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw dormitories, but that's all—" She jumped as the train whistle blew.

"I'd better get on. Thanks, Ginny." Harry reached out to shake her hand again, and smiled reassuringly as he felt it quivering in his. "Friends, right?"

"Friends." Ginny swallowed once, then returned the smile, its corners settling into place even as her handclasp grew stronger. "Henry."

Harry grinned at her, then hurried across the platform to climb aboard the Hogwarts Express, choosing one of the carriages near the end where he didn't see as many students already hanging out the windows to call to friends or relatives. Finding an empty compartment, he stowed his backpack on the luggage rack over his head, after opening it enough to extract the story he'd been writing earlier. Unfolding it, he skimmed down the final page until he came to the last sentence he'd written in his room at Privet Drive.

"He didn't know what he was going to," he read aloud, softly, as the train whistled again. "But it had to be better than what he was leaving behind."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  And I obviously disclaim that quote, which has always been one of my favorites from the first canon Harry Potter book.
> 
> Sorry for the wait, all. My head has been griping at me about the fact that I am now providing administrative support for approximately 120 employees at my place of work, which I like to call Glass Bathroom Bank (long story), and do not at this time have anyone to back me up in this endeavor. So that if I take a day off, sick day, vacation, what have you, the work simply doesn't get done. Instead it piles up until I get back. Fun.
> 
> If you would like to support my ongoing attempt to escape from corporate America, you can always pledge a bit of money at my [Patreon page](http://www.patreon.com/annebwalsh), or purchase one or more of my original novels or collections (search for Anne B. Walsh at your favorite purveyor of fine e-books) or, if money's tight for you right now, leave a review or comment, either here or on [Facebook](http://www.facebook.com/annebwalsh.page). My thanks goes out to all those who have already done so. Knowing people are still reading and enjoying my work helps my mood and my health more than I can express.
> 
> Tomorrow is Fiction Friday on my blog, [Anne's Randomness](http://www.annebwalsh.com/blog), where I will be continuing my retelling of "The Most Incredible Thing". Will I be able to make it doubly fictional with another chapter of this story as well? Stranger things have happened. Thanks, as always, for reading, and I'll see you next time, whenever that is!


	17. For Better and Worse

As he followed his mother and brothers through King's Cross Station, towards the barrier hiding platform nine and three-quarters, Ron Weasley wished he could feel as excited as he'd dreamed he would feel on this special day of his life.  


_But every time I've dreamed it, there were people there who don't actually exist. Like Henry, Jeanie and Mal, little Pearl…_

His hands went up to his shoulders as he remembered how it felt to have Pearl Blake leap onto his back without warning. The ambushing hug from behind was her standard method of greeting him, to which the proper response was a yelp of surprise, followed by a swift tweak of a braid or a tickle under the arms.

_She's such a tiny thing. Always has been, right back to the first time I saw her in my dreams, outside the orchard three winters back._ Ron hid a smile as his mother directed Percy through the barrier. _Packing another snowball together and yelling at Fred and George. "Why don't you pick on somebody your own size," she said, when either of them would have made two of her…_

One of the twins' voices broke through Ron's reverie. It was either Fred pretending to be George, or George pretending to be outraged that their own mother couldn't tell them apart. Ron didn't see why the twins should object to people mistaking them for one another when they did their best to obscure the issue on a daily basis, but the conversation brought up another dream-memory, this one of a boy his own age with a shock of brown hair and a sly smile.

" _Don't let them fool you," advised Mal, stepping between the twins and pointing. "He's Fred, that's George."_

_Both twins grimaced. "How can you always do that?" demanded the now-identified George._

_Mal grinned. "Fred's prettier," he said, and vanished through the barrier to the sound of laughter all around._

"Come along, Ron," said his mother's voice as her hand plucked at his sleeve. "Honestly, what's the matter with you today?"

"Nothing." Ron shook his head, trying to dismiss the dreams from his mind. "I'm fine."

Still, he couldn't help but keep his eyes open for anyone who reminded him of his dream-friends as he stepped onto platform nine and three-quarters. He thought for a moment he'd spotted Jeanie, but the girl with the bushy brown hair was gazing about with an awestruck expression very unlike Jeanie's usual cool competence, and no one near her looked anything like Mal or Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds. Another boy resembled Henry slightly, but he was far too tall, taller even than Ron was himself, and his incredulous stares at things like trunks being levitated up the steps onto the train matched not-Jeanie's.

_I suppose that means they're Muggleborns. So they couldn't be who I was thinking about anyway._

With a little sigh, Ron gave up his quest in favor of listening to the twins wind Percy up about being a prefect and his mother cutting it off short. Ginny seemed to have disappeared, and Ron found himself wishing he could do the same. Going to Hogwarts didn't seem like it was going to be any different from living at home.

_Percy'll follow all the rules and do more than he has to do, like always, and the twins'll break all the rules and only do what they want to do, like always, and I'll just sort of muddle along. Like always._

He looked up at the clouds of steam puffing from the engine, his eyes finding in the curls and billows the outlines of the faces he'd been secretly hoping he might see today.

_They always make me feel, in the dreams, like I can do more than muddle. Like I'm somebody special, somebody important._

_I wish I could feel that way while I was awake._

The train whistled, snapping Ron out of his momentary daydream. Fred and George were hanging out adjacent windows, his mother scolding them shrilly, and Ginny had reappeared from wherever she'd gone to. Awkwardly, he slid his arm around her for a hug. "See you at Christmas, I guess," he said.

"I guess so. Have a good term." Ginny glanced towards the far end of the train. "Why don't you go down there?" she suggested. "I don't see as many people. It might be easier to get a seat."

"I will. Thanks." Ron turned to say goodbye to his mother and let her fuss over him one last time, then hurried down the length of the train towards the area Ginny had pointed out, swinging himself up into a carriage just in time as the train whistled again and the brakes let go. He could hear the twins promising to send Ginny a Hogwarts toilet seat, and wondered for a moment how she'd be able to tell. Was the school crest carved into them somewhere, or the House crests for the dormitory toilets, the way they were embroidered on the corners of sheets and towels so the house-elves could be sure to get the right linens back to each dormitory?

_No, that's stupid. Toilet seats don't move about. Not unless somebody's hexed them, or the twins are blowing things up again._

Ron leaned out of the carriage long enough to wave to his mother and Ginny (who wasn't crying this year, he noticed, though she did seem very interested in the windows further along the train), then climbed the rest of the steps and shut the door behind himself. Several compartments had their doors shut already, and a quick glance at the windows revealed their seats fully occupied, until he came to the middle of the carriage, where a lone boy sat looking at a few sheets of paper.

"D'you mind?" Ron asked, sliding the door open and gesturing to the compartment. "Everywhere else is full."

The boy nodded, looking up from his papers. He had a thin but friendly face, topped with a messy thatch of black hair which grew every which way. Brilliant green eyes regarded Ron steadily from behind round-framed glasses. Ron frowned a little, trying to pin down his vague feeling of recognition, but then dismissed it. There were only so many ways people's faces could be put together, after all.

"You a first year?" he asked, shutting the door and sitting down on the opposite seat.

"Yeah." The boy folded up his papers and tucked them away in a pocket. "You?"

"Yeah." Ron scooted forward on the seat, holding out his hand. "Ron Weasley."

The boy smiled a bit lopsidedly and met the hand with his own. "Nice to meet you," he said. "I'm Harry Potter."

Ron felt his eyes go so wide he was amazed they were still inside his head. "You're not," he blurted before he could stop himself. "I mean— _are_ you?"

"Have been all my life." Harry's smile broadened. "More or less. Can I have my hand back?"

"Oh. Sorry." Ron let go and sat back, his mind whirling. He'd known, in some corner of his mind, that The Boy Who Lived was only a few months younger than he was himself, that they would likely be in the same year at Hogwarts, but never in his wildest fantasies had he considered that he might casually meet the hero of the wizarding world on the train to school. "Do you really have…" he began, then lost his nerve and brushed a hand against his forehead rather than finish the sentence aloud.

"What, this?" Harry parted his fringe with two fingers, revealing the famous lightning-bolt scar. "It's there. But you know what's funny?" He grinned, a quick flash of humor that invited Ron to share the joke. "You probably know more about me than I do. Up until last month, I never knew I was anything special at all."

"You didn't?" Ron fought the urge to rub his eyes or pinch his arm. If this was a dream, it wasn't one from which he wanted to wake up. "How come?"

"I grew up with my mum's sister and her family. They're Muggles." Harry glanced up at the luggage rack, where a battered backpack reposed, then turned his attention back to Ron. "I saw your family on the platform, I think. Are you all magical? How many brothers do you have?"

"Five all told, and then me and my little sister Ginny, and yeah, all magical. Mum and Dad too, and most of my relations." Ron cast his mind through his family tree as far as he knew it. "I think Mum has a second cousin who's a Squib, but we don't talk about him."

"Squib?" Harry asked, frowning.

"That's when your family's magic but you're not. Sort of the opposite of a Muggleborn." Ron glanced over his shoulder, towards the rest of the train. "Percy's a fifth year, he's a prefect for Gryffindor, and then Fred and George are twins, they're third years and they're always getting into trouble. Bill and Charlie've already left school, they're older. Mum says she's looking forward to next year, when she'll finally have us all out of the house."

"Mums always say things like that, from what I've seen." Harry shrugged. "I don't think they mean anything by it. So what do you like to do? Do you know how to fly yet? I can't wait to learn how. I used to think I might want to be a pilot when I got older, but broomsticks look so much better than airplanes or helicopters."

"I can fly a bit. The twins let me use their brooms sometimes over the summers, if I do their chores for them." Ron grimaced at the thought of the hours of garden degnoming he'd performed by himself, though that was a small price to pay for a few minutes riding Fred's Comet or George's Cleansweep. "Mum and Dad got them these old used broomsticks for their birthday, not this past year but the year before, and they spent the entire summer cleaning them up and getting them into better condition, and then last year they went out for Gryffindor's Quidditch team and got on as Beaters."

"Beaters." Harry's forehead furrowed. "That's the players who go after the Bludgers, right? The crazy black balls that try and kill you?"

"You don't know Quidditch?" Ron blinked in astonishment. "How—oh, right. Muggles. Don't suppose Muggles have broomsticks, and they wouldn't be able to enchant the Bludgers or the Snitch either. What do Muggles play, then?"

"All sorts of things. Football's a really popular one." Harry sketched a flat rectangle in midair. "There's only one ball, it's round and about so big, and you can't touch it with your hands, but anything else goes. You've got to try to get it into your opponents' net, and keep it away from yours. It wouldn't work very well on broomsticks, as far as I can see from the pictures. Don't you need your legs to hold on with while you're flying?"

"Yeah, you do," Ron confirmed, settling back into his seat. "Usually legs and a hand too. That's part of the trick of playing Chaser, is either being able to hang onto the Quaffle with just one arm or being a good enough flyer to only use your legs. Keepers, who guard the goal hoops, they have to have really excellent balance because they've got to have both hands free at all times to catch the Quaffle, and that might mean going up or down or sideways really fast…"

His initial unease at meeting Harry Potter, the hero of half his mother's bedtime stories and two-thirds of his own secret fantasies, had vanished as though it had never existed. Harry Potter, the real person, wanted to know about all sorts of things that Ron could explain, and knew about other things that Ron had never dreamed existed (such as an American Muggle sport called baseball he'd studied during his final term in Muggle school, which he thought could be adapted for broomsticks without much trouble), and was generally fun to talk to.

Ron wasn't positive, but he thought he might just have made his first friend.

* * *

"Excuse me," said a voice from the compartment door, drawing Harry's attention away from the Chocolate Frog he was unwrapping. A round-faced boy stood there, looking worried. "Have you seen my toad?"

Harry shook his head mutely, not trusting his voice. He recognized the face, but this hesitant and fretful-looking Neville Longbottom was a world away from the happy, confident boy Henry counted as a friend, and Harry had a sneaking suspicion he knew why.

_If his parents only stopped the Death Eaters who attacked them because they were being extra careful after catching Lucius Malfoy, and Lucius Malfoy's still free around here…_

"I've lost him again!" Neville groaned aloud. "He keeps getting away from me!"

"He'll turn up." Harry picked a Licorice Wand off the pile of sweets beside him. "Maybe try putting a few bits of this out near the last place you saw him? He might think they were bugs."

"I suppose." Neville took the Licorice Wand, though he looked doubtful. "If you see him, let me know?"

"Sure," said Ron through a mouthful of Cauldron Cake as Neville shut the door to the compartment again. "Don't know what he's so fussed about," he said once he'd swallowed. "If I'd brought a toad, I'd lose it as quick as I could manage. Mind you, I brought Scabbers, so I can't talk."

"Scabbers?" asked Harry, going back to his Frog.

"Oh, didn't I mention Scabbers?" Ron reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out what appeared to be a large handful of gray fur. "He's my rat. Percy's rat until this past summer, but then the letter came with Percy's prefect badge and Mum and Dad went over all gooey and bought him his own owl, so Scabbers got handed down the line." He set the rat on his knee and crumbled a bit of Cauldron Cake between his fingers. "Scabbers! Come on, Scabbers, food! He's totally useless," he added to Harry as a pointed head lifted out of its furry coil and yellowed rodent teeth were bared in a yawn. "Never wakes up unless he's eating."

Harry made a noncommittal noise, looking closely at the fat gray rat with its twitching nose and naked tail. Somewhere in the back of his mind, certain memories of Henry's were beginning to stir, memories of the often-repeated stories of his parents' days at Hogwarts, memories of nicknames and reasons for those nicknames, memories of conversations he hadn't been supposed to overhear, the latest of which had taken place at the baseball park a few weeks before (keeping box score wasn't _that_ difficult). "How long had Percy had him before he gave him to you?" he asked casually.

"As long as I can remember, really." Ron shrugged. "The way I heard it, Percy found him in the garden one day, and brought him inside all upset because his paw was hurt. Mum wasn't too sure about having a rat in the house, but it was starting to get cold at nights and she didn't want to throw him back out, and Percy promised to take care of him, so she said it was all right. She used this salve she brews on his paw and the hurt spot scabbed right over, and that's why Percy named him Scabbers." He grinned a little. "He was only about five years old, but Bill and Charlie haven't stopped ragging him about it since. Here you go, Scabbers, Cauldron Cake. You like this stuff."

_Five years old._ Harry set the Chocolate Frog aside. His appetite had momentarily deserted him. _Percy's a fifth year now, so it was ten years ago that he was five, and "starting to get cold at nights" sounds like autumn to me. A rat with a hurt paw, turning up out of nowhere in a wizarding family's garden, ten years ago this autumn…_

But, Harry reminded himself before he got carried away by his own storytelling, he had no proof. Scabbers might be nothing more than a rat who'd been smart enough to trade the dubious blessings of freedom for the security and comfort of a human household, and the story Henry had heard his dad telling his uncle at the baseball park could easily have been an invention of his dreaming mind to explain why none of the adults in Henry's life were present in Harry's.

_But I still don't want to look at him too long._

_Even if none of it's true, it makes me angry to think about what I might have had._

"You might want to keep him in your pocket a while yet," he suggested to Ron once Scabbers had finished his pile of crumbled Cauldron Cake and was cleaning his whiskers with his forepaws. "There's an awful lot of owls and cats around, and I thought I saw a big dog somewhere on the platform. It'd be a shame if he made it all this way with Percy and then got eaten the first day you took him to Hogwarts."

"Ugh." Ron shuddered. "Percy'd never let me live that down. Thanks for thinking of it." He slid Scabbers back into his pocket, then broke off a piece of Pumpkin Pasty to drop in beside the rat. "Who'd have brought a big dog? They probably won't be allowed to keep it, not unless they're related to somebody who can bend the rules for them…"

A discussion of people who seemed to be able to get away with anything, magical editions vs. Muggle, was well underway when the compartment door opened again.

"Has anyone seen a toad?" asked a girl's voice. "Neville's lost one."

"We've already told him we haven't seen it," said Ron impatiently, facing the speaker. His eyes widened slightly, as though he were surprised by something or trying to track down an errant memory, but then he shook his head.

Harry turned to see what had provoked this reaction.

For the second time in just over a month, he felt a cold chill shoot down his spine.

The girl standing in the doorway was already wearing her new Hogwarts robes, with the gray school crest over her heart showing that she hadn't yet been Sorted. Her hair was decidedly bushy and a middling shade of brown, as were the eyes now fixed suspiciously on Harry. "Is something wrong?" she demanded of him. "Do I have dirt on my nose?"

Once again unable to trust his voice, Harry shook his head.

_Like brother, like sister, I guess…_

"Someone looking for a toad?" asked another voice, and this time Harry wasn't able to keep from smiling. He glanced over at Ron and waved his hand at the interior of the compartment, and after an instant of surprise (probably, Harry thought, at being consulted in the matter), Ron nodded.

"Care to come in?" Harry asked the people in the doorway, waving at the empty seats beside himself and Ron. "We've got room."

"Thank you," said the girl who was surely Jeanie Reynolds's alter ego, stepping across the threshold and sitting down on the other side of Harry's pile of sweets. Neville followed her in, looking a bit nervously over his shoulder. Harry wasn't surprised, as the next person into the compartment wasn't, strictly speaking, a person at all. Orion had filled out a great deal since Harry had last seen him, and his copper fur gleamed with health, though he was opening and closing his mouth and wrinkling his nose as though trying to rid himself of a bad taste or smell.

"Did you say you'd found a toad?" Neville asked the pale-blond boy now standing at the entrance to the compartment.

"I've got him, but Orion there found him." Draco reached into an inner pocket of his robes and produced the hand-sized, wart-covered amphibian. "Here you go."

"Trevor!" Neville took the toad eagerly and sat down beside Ron. "Thanks so much! I'm Neville Longbottom, by the way."

"Draco Malfoy. Laugh and get it over with, and then call me Mal," Draco added at Ron's faint snort, as he stepped into the compartment and shook Neville's non-toad-holding hand. "And you must be, hang on now…" He waggled his fingers as though counting on them. "Ron Weasley. Right?"

"How'd you know that?" Ron blurted.

"My cousin used to date your brother Charlie. Tonks, the crazy one with the pink hair."

"Oh, right!" Ron's face cleared as he shook Draco's hand in his turn. "How's she doing? She was always fun to have around."

"Thanks, I think so too, and she's fine, just busy with her apprenticeship. I'll let her know you remembered her." Draco finger-combed a bit of hair off his face. "Now you two I don't know," he said, turning to face Harry and the girl. One eyelid dropped in a lightning-fast wink to Harry, who had already caught onto the idea.

_If we're too friendly, too fast, somebody might figure out that we have more in common than just meeting at Madam Malkin's. Better all around if we pretend this is the first time._

"Hermione Granger," the girl was saying now, shaking Draco's hand, and Harry breathed a silent sigh of relief at finally having a proper name to use for her (it lessened the probability of his blurting out one that he should have no way to know). "Are you all from magical families? I'm not, it was ever such a surprise when my Hogwarts letter came, but I've tried a few of the simpler spells in our textbooks and they all worked for me, I can't wait to start classes—did you say your dog's name was Orion?" She held out her hand to this creature, who sniffed politely at her knuckles before curling up against the compartment's side wall. "He's very handsome, but he's awfully large, isn't he? Are you going to be allowed to keep him in the dormitories?"

Across the compartment, Ron rolled his eyes at Harry, opening and shutting his hand quickly like a yammering mouth. Harry shrugged one shoulder, wishing he could explain the nerves he could all but smell radiating off Hermione, which were surely contributing to her current fit of babbling.

_She's equally scared of what's coming that she doesn't know, and what's coming that she_ does _, because she has no way to explain to herself_ how _she knows it. But I can't tell Ron that, because he'd want to know how_ I _know so much about somebody I've just this instant met…_

"…would make things easier, because their dorms are just below ground level, so we might be able to arrange a dog door," Draco was saying as Harry reengaged his ears. "What about you? Know anything about the Houses?"

"I've been asking around and I hope I'm in Gryffindor, it sounds by far the best." Hermione peered down at the Hogwarts crest ornamenting her robes. "Though I suppose Ravenclaw wouldn't be too bad."

"It's not really about best or worst, though, is it?" said Harry, drawing all eyes to himself. "It's about being who you are, and not trying to turn yourself into who you're not just because someone else thinks it's best. It has to be what _you_ think is best, where _you'd_ be the happiest. That's why the Houses are the way they are. I might like Gryffindor for myself, but if being Sorted into Ravenclaw would make you happy, then I'd say Ravenclaw's the best for you."

"I never thought about it like that." Hermione was regarding him now with respect, which Harry found a pleasant change from the amused tolerance with which Jeanie most often eyed her younger male relatives. "But I'm sorry, I don't think I caught your name."

"I don't think I threw it." Harry grinned at Hermione's reluctant laugh. "Harry Potter. Pleased to meet you."

"Are you really." Hermione tried to smile, but the expression looked a little strained as she glanced from Harry to Draco, with sideways flicks of her eyes towards Ron and Neville as well. "That's amazing. I've read so much about you. But I really should go." She got to her feet and hurried to the compartment door, words tumbling behind her. "There's something I forgot, I have to go and deal with it. I'm glad you found your toad, Neville, good luck keeping hold of him—"

"What's with her?" Ron asked as Hermione vanished into the corridor.

"Girls." Draco shrugged, sitting down where Hermione had been. "Who knows. So where do you lot want to be Sorted? Hufflepuff for you, Neville? Orion could help keep track of Trevor for you if you like. And Ron, I know Weasleys tend towards Gryffindor, but you could always be the family rebel and try for Slytherin instead…"

Under Ron's mock-indignant, laughing rebuttal, Harry noticed Orion get to his feet and slip out the door Hermione had left open.

* * *

Hermione leaned against the wall of the corridor, shaking from head to toe, wishing with all her heart that one of the spells she'd been able to learn on her own would have sufficed to turn her invisible.

_I can't do this. I can't go on like this. I was hoping they wouldn't be here but they are, and they_ have _to know who I am, I hardly look different at all from the dreams, they look very different but who they_ are _is still the same, I can tell, and the closer I am to them the more likely it is I'll slip and give myself away, and who_ knows _what would happen if I did but it couldn't possibly be good, we might even all be dragged out of this world and into the other one and I don't want that even if they do, or into that void in between the worlds which_ nobody _wants—_

Something cold and wet touched her hand, making her yip in a very undignified manner. "Orion!" she hissed, glaring down at the copper-coated dog. "Go away, I don't want you!"

Orion promptly sat, gazing up at her with soulful brown eyes.

"Well, all right." Hermione slid to the floor beside the dog. "But only for a little while."

A cold nose snuffled once against her ear, then withdrew, and Hermione couldn't stop the smile. "You know that's not very comfortable," she said, leaning her weight against the dog's solid body. "Oh, Orion, what am I going to do? I want to be the best, I want to prove it wasn't a mistake to let me come to Hogwarts, but I _can't_ face them every day when we have to be strangers, I just _can't_ …"

The dog lifted his heavy paw and brushed it against the side of Hermione's head, then planted it firmly against the Hogwarts crest on her robes.

"Listen to my head and my heart?" Hermione smiled, laying her hand across the paw. "I could almost think you know my parents. Any of my parents. All right, head and heart it is. And that comes with a bonus." After rubbing a few times behind Orion's ears, she got to her feet. "My head and my heart both think Ravenclaw sounds wonderful, and judging by what I saw in there, none of _them_ are likely to be Eagles any time soon!"

Orion nudged at her hand with his nose, and Hermione laughed and administered another ear scratch before she pushed the dog gently away. "Go back to your boys," she said. "I'll be just fine."

_And I will not think about how much more pleasant this train ride was when I was somebody else, because I'm_ not _somebody else, not here, not now. I'm me, myself, Hermione Jean Granger, and I'm not about to give that up to make other people happy._

_No matter who they are, or might have been, to me._   


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that was unexpectedly difficult to write. Stress levels at the job continue to rise, which is a contributing factor, but I think the 'honeymoon' phase of this story may be over. Of course, maybe not. We'll see how future chapters play out.
> 
> As ever, please investigate the [Facebook page](http://facebook.com/annebwalsh.page) and the [blog](http://annebwalsh.com/blog) to keep up with what I'm doing, and thanks for reading!


	18. To Friends and Dreams

Speculation ran rampant in the Great Hall at Hogwarts on the morning of 2 September, not only about the upcoming school year and the young wizards and witches newly Sorted into their Houses, but over one young wizard who hadn't been Sorted, for the good and sufficient reason that he hadn't been present for the Hat to do its work.

"Harry Potter…"

The murmurs of the famous name circled the Hall, dying away here, picking up anew there. The Boy Who Lived, within the span of thirty seconds, had been dead for ten years, was a Squib taken in by his mother's Muggle relations, had been rescued from an orphans' home and un-aged into a baby to be adopted by pureblood relatives of his father, and was alive and well and living in Paris.

"I dreamed last night I met Harry Potter," said Ron Weasley to Henry Blake, his friend for several years through visits and letters, now also his dormmate as a Gryffindor first year. "Just bumped into him on the train to school. He was all right, but he didn't know very much about most things."

"Well, if you listen to some of these stories, that'd make sense," said Henry in his slightly nasal American accent, circling two fingers to indicate the entirety of the Hall. "If he'd been raised Muggle, or off in hiding somewhere, or both of those, he wouldn't. Except we'll probably never know, because the reason everybody's telling all these stories is that he's not here." He stabbed his fork moodily into his eggs. "I know I wouldn't want to be here, if I were him. Who'd want to spend all day, every day, getting stared at?"

Across the table, a burly second year turned to look Henry up and down. "Where'd you come from?" he demanded.

"Creedsdale, Pennsylvania, United States of America," Henry shot back without a pause.

"What're you doing here, then?" The second year sneered. "American schools wouldn't take you?"

"If it were up to me, I'd be at Adastra Academy right now." Henry checked his wristwatch. "Or more likely, still in my own bed sleeping, since it's three in the morning there. But my parents wanted me to go to Hogwarts like they did, so here I am." He pushed a rack of toast out of the way and offered his hand. "Henry Blake."

The second year looked askance at the hand for a moment, then met it with his own. "Cormac McLaggen," he said. "But if your parents went to Hogwarts, then why…"

"Mom moved to America for work, and Dad had family issues," said Henry smoothly. "They met there and settled down together, had me and my little sister, but they signed us up for Hogwarts because they never wanted us to lose sight of where we'd come from. How about you? Any brothers or sisters?"

"One sister. She's a fourth year, in Ravenclaw." McLaggen waved towards the table two down from the Gryffindors' own. "How old's your sister?"

"She's nine, but I've got two cousins about my same age. Jeanie's a Ravenclaw too, and Mal's a Hufflepuff." Henry glanced over at this table, situated beside the Gryffindors' own, where Mal and Neville were sitting side by side, chatting with their new Housemates. "Lucky little jerk. He gets to wear black and gold all the time."

McLaggen frowned. "What's black and gold got to do with anything?"

"It's the colors of our sports teams at home. Baseball, football—American football, that is—and hockey, for Muggles, and Quodpot and crosseball for wizards. All five of the teams have black and gold as their colors." Henry grinned. "We're the only city in the world that does it like that."

"Cool. What's your Quidditch team, or don't you have one yet?"

"Haven't decided. How about you?"

"Falmouth Falcons. Best team in the league." McLaggen stuck out his chest proudly. "I've got a spare poster of theirs you can have. Give it to you tonight in the common room."

"Sounds great. Thanks." Henry helped himself to a piece of toast from the rack and started loading his eggs and bacon on top of it.

"You're really good at that," said Ron after McLaggen was safely engaged on another conversation with a short-haired witch next to him.

"Hmm?" Henry asked through his mouthful of breakfast food.

"At that. You know." Ron waved his hand vaguely in McLaggen's direction. "He started out wanting to pick a fight, and ended up offering you a Quidditch poster."

"Oh, that." Henry looked up at the high table, where his parents sat side by side (Ron knew the relation existed, but doubted the rest of the school realized it, since "Blake, Henry" had been the second student Sorted before the feast began and Healer Thea Blake hadn't been introduced until pudding was appearing on the tables). "Well, you know Pearl. She's got a big mouth, and she tends to swing first and think afterwards, which means she gets herself into a lot of trouble that we have to get her out of. So I've gotten really good at playing dumb, pretending I don't realize that somebody's trying to be rude to me, and most of the time it works. They get so confused that I'm not getting angry, they calm down themselves, and then you're home free."

"Got it," said Ron, though he wasn't sure he did. "Where is Pearl, anyway? I don't see her."

"Down in the kitchens with her friend Cassie, getting spoiled rotten by the house-elves." Henry made a face. "They don't want to advertise it too much that some of the teachers bring their kids along with them to Hogwarts, because it looks like favoritism, so the girls are only allowed to eat in the Hall on special occasions. Pearl's probably going to have every secret passage in this castle mapped out before the year's even halfway over, and I won't have a chance to keep up with her because I've got classes!"

"Doesn't she have lessons of her own, though?" Ron chose another piece of toast for himself and started spreading on marmalade. "From your mum or somebody?"

"We went to regular school before this, but Cousin Cecy said Pearl could sit in on some of Cassie's homeschool sessions, and Aunt Gigi's going to chip in with that whenever she's not too busy." Henry nodded towards his aunt, who was chatting animatedly with Professor Charity Burbage of Muggle Studies. "So yeah, Pearl'll have some work to do, but she's fast at that kind of thing. Not as fast as Jeanie, of course."

"Nobody's as fast as Jeanie." Ron shook his head in wonder. "I've never seen anyone read like that. Her eyes don't even go back and forth on the page, they just go zipping straight down the center, like she's afraid the words are going to get away from her if she doesn't read them all right this very minute."

"Dad actually enchanted her books to make the words do something like that a couple times while we were growing up. Mix themselves up so the story didn't make any sense anymore, or fall to the bottom of the page, or jump completely off it and dance around her." Henry snickered. "You could hear her scream all over the house whenever he'd do that to her. It was priceless."

The bell rang just as Ron took his last sticky, crunchy bite. Henry downed the last of his morning pumpkin juice and set his goblet back on the table. "Tell you what we do need," he said under the noise of several hundred students climbing over benches and picking up bags. "We need a place to meet, to hang out together. You, me, Jeanie, Mal, Captain, Pearl. Keep your eyes open for any likely-looking hallways."

"You mean like the one on the third floor Dumbledore mentioned last night?" Ron slung his own bag over his shoulder. "I'd rather not die any painful deaths this year, thanks."

"No, but that still might be a place to start." Henry drummed his fingers thoughtfully against his opposite hand. "If people are staying off that floor entirely for fear they'll get too close to that corridor, maybe we could find a spot somewhere else up there and claim it for our own…"

* * *

"What is the matter with you?" Thea Blake demanded of her husband as the Great Hall began to clear. "You've been making faces since we woke up this morning, and you've barely eaten anything."

"That is serious," said Gigi, pulling a troubled face.

"Not anymore, it's not," John put in, making both women snicker.

"Har de har har." Ryan glared at his friend. "It's nothing, really. Just a leftover from a dream I had last night."

"What kind of dream?" Gigi sipped from her third cup of tea.

"Have you ever picked up a toad?"

"Yes."

"With your mouth?"

"No."

"Don't." Ryan pointed his finger down his throat. "I couldn't smell or taste anything else for _hours_ after I'd had that thing in my mouth. And it wasn't just toad, either. It'd been around one of those awful plants that do Stinksap, what do you call them…"

" _Mimbulus mimbletonia_?" Thea suggested.

"That's the one." Ryan awarded his wife a seated bow. "So I had toad with a hint of Stinksap stuck in my mouth and nose, all afternoon and all night long. Blah. No fun."

"We could always see if Severus has anything to get rid of that for you." John nodded towards the Hogwarts Potions Master, who was standing at a side door of the Great Hall discussing something with his wife. "It might even freshen up that doggy breath of yours."

Ryan raised an eyebrow. "Mr. Padfoot wonders if Mr. Moony is harboring some hostility towards him."

"Mr. Moony is shocked, shocked, that Mr. Padfoot would consider such a thing, but does have a suspicion that Mr. Padfoot might know at what point the Dungbomb made its way into Mr. Moony's trunk."

"Mr. Padfoot would like to plead the Fifth Amendment on this subject."

"We're not in America anymore, Ryan."

"Damn."

* * *

"Shame you weren't here last year," said the fourth year Hufflepuff boy who had appointed himself Mal and Neville's House-brother (a thoroughly Badger institution, which none of the other Houses matched as far as the Hufflepuffs were aware, and didn't much care one way or another) as they made their way out of the Great Hall. "You could have met my House-sister. She was a lot of fun. What they call a Metamorphmagus, so she could look like just about anything just by wanting to."

Neville started to open his mouth, then closed it at Mal's quick headshake.

"I'm going to miss her, but at least she got what she wanted." The older boy paused on the stairs to gaze out the window. "Auror apprenticeship. It's hard, but worth it, and perfect for her. No matter what she did, she did it with everything she had. That's how she got all the marks she needed on her N.E.W.T.s, and she still managed to be a reserve Beater for our Quidditch team too, and tutor me through about half a year's worth of Defense Against the Dark Arts. The professor they got in as a substitute for Quirrell wasn't very good. I hope this new assistant professor knows a bit more about the subject…"

Turning back to the younger boys, he frowned. "Hang on a tick. Your hair wasn't like that before. Was it?"

"What, this?" Mal raked a careless hand through his untidy crop, now black spangled with gold rather than his usual middling brown. "No, it wasn't. You're talking about Dora Tonks, aren't you?"

"You know her?"

"She's a cousin of mine." Mal grinned. "And as you can see, I've got just a trace of Metamorphmagic myself. I don't use it often, because it takes a really long time for me to change anything, but now and again it's fun."

"You're faster than you used to be," said Neville. "I remember the summer we first met, it took you a whole minute to change your hair even from one shade of brown to another, and now you can do something like that in thirty seconds." He waggled his fingers. "I counted."

"Well, you're going to be popular at the Quidditch matches, I can see that much." Cedric Diggory chuckled, beckoning for the boys to follow him once more. "Just don't try any patterns with Snitches, all right? Dora did that one time last year while she was playing, and the actual Snitch tried to hide in her hair. We had a three-way collision on the pitch, her, me, and the Gryffindor Seeker…"

* * *

"More tea? Yes, please." Pearl allowed the house-elf in the Hogwarts tea towel kilt to replenish her cup, sniffing with pleasure at the floral fragrance of the herbal blend Cassie's father had created especially for his daughter. "Shall we have a toast?" she asked her friend across the small table they were sharing.

"Yes, let's." Cassie picked up her own teacup. "A toast to friends and dreams."

"To friends and dreams," Pearl echoed, tapping her cup against Cassie's. "If not friends _in_ dreams. I don't have very many of those."

"Me neither." Cassie sighed, tucking her long, dark hair behind her ears so that it wouldn't fall into her tea. "I love my dream-aunt and -uncle very much, but there just aren't very many other kids living in our neighborhood, and most of them don't want to play with me, because I'm…" She shrugged one shoulder. "Different. Because I have a different last name than the grownups I live with, or because I like to read and I do well in school, or maybe because they might have seen me do accidental magic. But I don't care. Even in my dreams I have Aunt Amelia and Uncle Phil, and Mummy whenever she can come and see me. And in real life I have her all the time, and Daddy and Hogwarts too. And now you."

"And now me." Pearl wiggled with glee in her low, comfortable chair, looking around at the enormous, vaulted room of stone which was the Hogwarts kitchens, filled with squeaky house-elf voices as the contingent of these beings currently resident at the school scurried to keep up with the breakfasting needs of students and teachers. "We're going to have so much _fun_ this year, and next year too! We'll learn _everything_ about the castle, if you don't already know it," she added in fairness to her friend. Cassie had, after all, lived at Hogwarts for most of her life. "And then we can bargain with what we know, to make sure we never get left out of adventures because we're 'too little' or we 'can't keep up'." The phrases were the bane of her existence.

"What about your dreams, where you're Meghan?" Cassie tipped a spoonful of sugar into her tea and stirred it. "You said in your letters once that they weren't bad, just boring. Is that still right?"

"They're a little worse right now, ever since August when her mother heard some sad news from home." Even to such a good friend as Cassie, Pearl hesitated to reveal such details as her father's original name or the crimes of which his gray-world self had been convicted in the court of public opinion before she'd ever been born. "She's been crying at night, when she thinks Meghan's asleep and can't hear her, and she's working harder than ever on her private projects."

"What kind of private projects?" Cassie helped herself to half a toasted scone from the plate of pastries the house-elves had provided for the end of the girls' breakfast. "My dad does those, and sometimes they make him swear a lot." She giggled. "I learned all my best words from him when his cauldrons aren't behaving."

Pearl smiled at the thought of this, but couldn't maintain the expression for long. "It's not just potions Meghan's mother's working with," she said. "She has all kinds of samples that've been taken from people, magical people and Muggles, and all different blood statuses of magical people, pureblood, half-blood, and Muggleborn. Squibs too. And she does tests on them, and writes down her results, and then sometimes she sends Meghan to stay with her aunt Amy and goes out late at night and doesn't come back until morning. I think, when she does that, she's going to the hospital to do experiments on actual _people._ "

Cassie gasped. "Experiments? You mean like—"

"Nothing bad, I don't think," said Pearl hastily. "Just…tests. Meghan's sneaked some looks at her logbooks, where she writes everything down, and I _think_ she's trying to find out where magic comes from, and where it lives, and how Muggleborns and Squibs happen. Whether magic depends on something in a person's body, in their DNA, or whether it's all in the soul, or even if it's a cross between the two."

"People have been trying to find that out for thousands of years." Cassie blew out her breath. "Pearl, you scared me! I thought it was something awful, like she was trying to breed dementors, or torturing Squib kids to try and make their magic come out!"

Pearl shook her head. "I think it's the opposite," she said quietly. "I think she's trying to find out if there's any way to take magic away from a person who has it. And she'd prefer to do it without hurting them, but if she has to hurt them, she will. Because she thinks keeping on having magic will hurt them more than taking it away would do, so she's willing to hurt them a little bit now to save them a lot more pain in the future."

"But…" Cassie stared open-mouthed at her friend. Clearly she couldn't decide which part of this to refute first. "But magic doesn't hurt!" she finally got out. "Magic's _wonderful!_ "

"Not to her." Pearl stared into the depths of her teacup, the bits and pieces of herb leaves in the liquid drifting without her conscious intent into the shape of a big, broad-faced dog. "To her, magic only means pain. She met Meghan's dad because they both had magic, and then he betrayed her and their friends because he believed in a different sort of magic, and killed a lot of people with some really, really Dark magic. So she hates her magic and wants to find some way to get rid of it, and to get rid of Meghan's, too."

"That's really sad." Cassie sniffled a little over her teacup. "But it's only in your dreams, right? Your real mum isn't like that?"

"No, she's not." Pearl took a sip of her tea, letting the bright, sweet flavors swirl in her mouth and chase some of her bad mood away. "But that's because my dad, my real dad, isn't an evil crazy murderer. He just writes them in his books."

"I liked best the one about the Strange Lady, with her magical silver knife that could cut a doorway into nowhere." Cassie shivered deliciously. "And if she knocked you through that doorway, you'd be lost in nowhere forever, unless somebody you loved more than life called your full name and told you to come home…"

"And that story, and what Dad based it on, made my real mom start a project of her own, back when my dad first wrote it, when I was really little. Like, five." Pearl held out her hand beside her chair to indicate how little she meant. "Back during the war, some of the Death Eaters used spells so Dark that the people they hurt ended up getting their minds and souls trapped, either inside of themselves or outside of everything. It's what happened to my Aunt Gigi's mom and dad. Mom's been researching for years now, and she thinks she might be close to brewing a potion that would help them find a way back from whatever nowhere they're in." She smiled a little. "She's hoping your dad will help her finish it, now that we're here."

"Of course he will." Cassie nodded hard. "Why wouldn't he?"

One or two reasons came to Pearl's mind, but she held her peace. Cassie, after all, didn't yet know the history between her father and Pearl's parents and uncle. "It'll probably still have to finish up with someone who loves them calling their name and telling them to come home," she said instead, taking the other half of Cassie's scone. "I hope it doesn't have to be someone magical. Aunt Gigi isn't, or hardly any."

"Isn't she? I didn't know that." Cassie dusted scone crumbs from her hands. "Did she need special permission to come to Hogwarts, then? I know there are Muggle-repelling spells all over the castle."

"She got it. From the Headmaster himself, no less." Pearl drew herself up grandly, as much as this was possible in such a comfortable chair. "Written permission for Gigi Rose Reynolds to enter the premises of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, signed, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore." She grinned. "She's going to help Professor Burbage set up _all_ kinds of things for her Muggle Studies classes. When she's not teaching us, that is."

"I can't wait." Cassie took another drink of her tea, then began to swirl the dregs clockwise in her cup. "I love getting lessons from Mum, but Mum's a pureblood, and sometimes it really shows. Dad knows a lot about both worlds, Muggle and magical, but he's busy a lot of the time, especially during the school year. So if we get lessons from both my mum and your aunt…"

"Then we'll have a good balance." It was one of Pearl's favorite concepts, both in abstract things such as life and in more concrete matters like her dances or her block sculptures. "That's one of the other reasons I don't like my dreams. With just me and Mama and Aunt Amy, it always feels unbalanced. Like trying to dance on a stage with a whole lot of rotten planks, so you're never sure where it's safe to step."

Cassie turned over her teacup onto her saucer, then looked up at Pearl before she lifted it. "If your mum in the dreams doesn't like magic that much…" She had to stop for a nervous swallow before she went on. "Is she even going to let you come to Hogwarts when you're old enough? Or let Meghan, I should say."

"No, she is." A little, twisted smile found its way to Pearl's lips. "She knows untrained magic is really and truly dangerous, and she doesn't want that for her daughter. But she doesn't want to watch it or get involved with it either, so she put in all the right paperwork to send Meghan thousands of miles away to learn about magic." She sighed, letting go once again of the painful chill which seemed to live permanently inside her chest in the gray world. "At least we know we'll have each other. Right?"

"Right." Cassie nodded firmly. "And I know somebody else I'll have too." She smiled a small, sneaky smile. "I've been asking Mummy questions for years, in the dreams. Careful questions, never too much at one time, but I always wrote down the answers. Somewhere she'd never think to look." Her hands shaped vertical cylinders and a flame beneath them. "In the margins of the instruction book for the chemistry set Uncle Will got me when I was six. And all those answers added up together mean my dream-dad is exactly where he ought to be. He's here." She stamped her foot on the stone floor. "Here at Hogwarts."

"So you'll see him when you get here!" Pearl caught her breath at the thought of the astonished, tearful discovery, whether it took place in the Great Hall in front of everyone or in the confines of an office or even in a deserted stretch of corridor. "But how will he know you're _you_? If he's like everybody else in the dreams, he'll think _this_ life is the dream. So you could just be some random girl whose face looks like his dream-daughter."

"Uh-uh." Cassie shook her head smugly. "Mummy was too clever for that. As long as he's not being stupid, _both_ names she gave me will tell him I ought to belong to him. It's too much of a coincidence otherwise, and Dad always says he doesn't believe in coincidence." She lifted her teacup and dipped her finger into the dregs of tea in her saucer, then used it to write out a name on the white tablecloth. "This is what I'll be Sorted by, in that world," she said, sitting back.

Pearl leaned forward to see what her friend had written, and giggled.

The name scribed in small, flowing handwriting on the tablecloth was Cassandra Evans.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *throws canon and mainline DV in blender, hits frappe, serves results* Hope you're still enjoying. More soon!

**Author's Note:**

> Greetings, O readers! My name is Anne B. Walsh, and I’ll be your author today!
> 
> So let me tell you a little bit about me. If you’re just here for the story, feel free to stop reading now. I’ll wait. 
> 
> Okay, as I was saying. American by birth and Pittsburgher by choice, I’m a massive word nerd, a bit of a general geek, and a lover of good food and musical theater. I’m also a pet-parent of four, sister of three, daughter of two, roommate of one, and since the age of five, I have been annoyed by things like the Disney trifecta of parenting styles (absent, stupid, or evil) and the “Get rid of the parents” rule of YA writing. Families can absolutely be a weird, dysfunctional pain in the butt, but most of them also have periods when things are working a little bit better, and I wanted to see those periods depicted more in the types of fiction I liked to read.
> 
> So, as Mr. John Reynolds advised his nephew a few paragraphs up, I put my head and my hands to work on what I wanted, and the results over the last ten years have been startling, even to me. I’ve produced a couple million words of Harry Potter fan fiction in various iterations of my main ‘verse (the Dangerverse, after its title OC, who both is and is not a Mary Sue…it’s complicated), along with three original novels and a number of shorter works, all working with the idea that a family, whether by blood or by choice or both, can actually be a pretty awesome thing to have. “For Your Own Good” does use some of the concepts and characters I developed for the DV, but I hope to make it fresh and fun for both old readers and new.
> 
> If you want to learn more about my writing, or about me, please visit either my website, annebwalsh.com (which houses my blog, Anne’s Randomness), or my Facebook page, facebook.com/annebwalsh.page (easy, no?), to keep up with all the latest news. My original novels, historical fantasy _A Widow in Waiting_ , family-focused fantasy _Homecoming_ , and soft science fiction _Killdeer_ , are also available on most booksellers’ websites (Amazon, B&N, Apple, etc), and if you’re wondering about the mugs used in this chapter, yes, they exist. Visit zazzle.com/annebwalsh for those and other fine, if silly, products.
> 
> Thank you very much for giving me this time, O readers, and allow me to hope that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Or at least of my providing you with an entertaining story. I’ll take either.


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